news from the zona

an allegory

2010-06-26T11:52:00.000-07:00

In a greek myth, Atalante, when merely an infant, had been left to die on a mountainside by her father, Iasos. Instead of dying, she was suckled by a bear, and became a renowned huntress. Iasos took her back, but he insisted that she marry. A woman suckled by a bear was, naturally, averse to bowing her head to a husband, so she made it a condition that she would only accept a man who beat her in a foot race. If her suitor lost, he was put to death. Hippomenes, who wanted to run that race but feared the inevitable result if he relied on his own speed, prayed to Aphrodite to help him. Aphrodite, rather offended at Atalanta’s attitude, gave her worshipper Hippomenes three golden apples, which he cleverly threw into Atalanta’s way as the race proceeded. And as she stooped to gather each apple, he increased his lead over her until he won.

A well known and worn tale, this. And of course, there are many allegories and morals that have been launched from that race. However, there is one allegory that I think has never been drawn from it, which is the allegory of punctuation. For it seems to me that writing, too, is a race. First the words race ahead of the writer, and then they race ahead of the reader. The writer, of course, wants the reader to remain behind the word until the very end – at which point the reader must burst ahead, win the race and close the book.

Punctuation is not quite words. The conventions for punctuating have come about quite slowly in the European languages, and they differ from one language to another. Punctuation corresponds to two things – sense and sound. To the race going on in the brain, and the race going on in the lungs. All races are the same in this respect – all racers race in their brains and lungs. The period, of course, being a full stop, is not like a golden apple, but is, theoretically, a pause in the entire race. But the comma, ah, the comma is a golden apple – it is thrown out by the writer, or by the writer’s substitute, the words, with the intent of slowing down the pursuer-reader. Indeed, these apples have an even greater power over the reader than Hippomenes’ apples, for it turns out that the course isn’t laid out before the race, and that the track over which the race takes place is made, in a sense, by the race. Instead of an oval in a stadium, the course goes jutting out at angles and makes inversions, and curlicues, and in general can't be said to make a figure. This is largely due to the power of the comma.

The comma, one could say, is the most powerful of all the tricks up the sleeve of the racer. That the race generally comes to the event barechested makes no difference.

Interestingly, the work that Canetti, or Viza Canetti, called the first “modern’ work of literature, Lenz, by Georg Büchner, is distinguished by its commas. The commas stand in not only for periods, but for whole phrases. Lenz, in the text, rambles madly in the mountains, until he finds an interval of peace, and then of course he’s mad again. This could be represented as madness had been represented before, with the whole panoply of descriptions furnishing our background, or our soliloquy. But Lenz’s madness is, I think, most represented by the comma. It is the commas that thrust the text ever forward, that work the lungs and puzzle the brain not with angles, but with leaps, with intervals that are simply cut out, that make this a very strange race. In fact, the reader will never win this race, because the words will simply stop, and the stopping point is not the finish line. Of course, Büchner was not the first romantic to discover the power of the fragment; Novalis was there long before him, as was Schlegel. He was, however, the first to discover that the fragment could be used against the affirming, the ever so humane, period. There is, of course, a cruelty in using commas to so abridge and so accelerate the supposed sentence. It makes our bodies, as readers, align to a different rhythm. Later, this rhythm, this amphetemined motion, will be taken up by Joyce, Faulkner, Cela, Garcia Marquez, etc.

Hippomenes forgot to properly thank Aphrodite for her gift. Aphrodite allowed Rhea to turn both runners into lions, which she yoked to her chariot. Rhea is the wife of Chronos – time itself. Reader, make your own inferences.

the creep's version of intellectual history: Paul Berman

2010-06-23T09:55:00.000-07:00

In the National Interest, David Rieff has a nice takedown of Paul Berman’s new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals. And yet… it is a takedown that continues the ‘conversation’, so to speak. But there are certain conversations that are still born from the beginning. Paul Berman, who has somehow established himself as a “historian” of Islamicist ideology, is so completely off base that he provides a nice study in how to do intellectual history wrongly.

How do you do it wrongly? Well, you take the intellectual history of a movement that has grown over the last sixty years and you snip out – all the pertinent history over the last sixty years. What you are left with is a comic book, in which the main thing is who agrees with the Nazis, and who didn’t.

Well, what a pretty issue! In Berman’s history, the line moves directly from the Mufti of Jerusalem in the 40s to Osama bin Laden – and so direct is this line that it doesn’t wait for, say, the massive support for fundamentalist Islam and its premiere state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, given by another state, the United States, followed by Western Europe, and involving a colorful cast of characters who make up the entirety of contemporary Middle Eastern history, beginning with Nassar. In this history, U.S. policy – and the desire for cheap gasoline – drops off the screen entirely. So if, for instance, it was U.S. policy to put in power the son of a very notorious Nazi sympathizer – I’m looking at you, Pahlavi family – this goes into the wastebasket of history – as opposed to, of course, Tariq Ramadan, whose father was (gasp!) a Nazi sympathizer. Roll over Eisenhower and tell Kermit Roosevelt the news!

(I can’t resist a blast from the past. In 1976, John Campbell, in Foreign Policy, told the fairy tale of Iran in a delightful way, echoing the blank Berman so assiduously preserves in his own fairy tale:

Its [Iran’s] rulers yielded when they had no choice, remaining ever sensitive to the
forms of sovereignty and always seeking to assert national rights and interests. Such an instance was the Anglo-Russian occupation of the country in World War II, which forced tbe abdication of Reza Shah, the founder of the modern Iranian state, in favor of his son, Mobammed Reza, but also brought pledges to respect Iran's sovereignty and to end the occupation after the war, pledges with which the United States was later associated.

Postwar Iran had reason to be grateful to the United States. American diplomatic support made it possible to get rid of the Soviet occupation forces after they had outstayed their welcome and fostered a separatist revolution in Iran's northern province of Azerbaijan [Editorial note: a policy that is now being followed by, surprise, the Americans]. And America's differences with Britain over the handling of the crisis that followed nationalization of tbe Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by the government of Mohammed Mosaddeq in the early 1950s enabled Iran to come out of the crisis with a new deal on oil, altbough Mosaddeq himself disappeared from the political scene.” This was written in 1976, when it was standard Cold War practice to mock the Soviets for re-writing their history. The nicest touch here – among so many - is Mosaddeq “disappearing.” In the American historical vernacular, disappearance always marks Manifest Destiny – the Indians, in this version of history, are always conveniently disappearing as the settlers “appear.’ Disappearance hearts Uncle Sam!)

Intellectual history has its place, but there is a reason that, among historians, it is regarded as fingerpainting for the senile. There is the large question of cause – a question that poor historians, those who are, let us say, averse to research, sluff off by referring vaguely to ‘influence’. However, Berman is not even a poor intellectual historian. There’s no indication that he has ever done any investigation whatsoever into the last sixty years of Middle Eastern history on any level more difficult that reading some columns in the Figaro. He proceeds, laughably enough, as though he were equipped with the razor sharp analysis of the trained Marxist, and yet he seemingly has no idea about such simple issues as money – where it comes from, who it goes to, and like that. Even a sixties simpleton with Berman’s connections could, if he wanted to, send some student flunky to study the popular periodicals of the 80s – you know, the decade in which Berman agonized over supporting the contras. It was a truly dialectical decision! In that decade, in fact, the U.S. and the House of Saud were as one in forging a truly wonderful anticommunist coalition that – as it happened – was based, from the latter’s point of view, on spreading a certain Islamic sect that rejoiced in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and was looked upon with approval by European powers (always willing to do anything for gas) as the money ‘appeared’ for mosque building. For instance, the Moslem World League, a Saudi organization, headquartered in Paris (the home, now, of so many “new philosophers” fighting against the scourge of fundamentalism – soldiers enrolling for a war thirty years late) dispersed, according to its own record, 4.5 million francs, between 1979-1983, for the building and repair of mosques. [Nielson, 18] Ah, a small but tidy sum, that. How much was really dispensed – by who, through what routes – is probably difficult to trace, although surely the records are there not only in Riyadh, but in the archives of the CIA and the French DGSE. A very important thing, mosque building – many a neo-con, back then, was ready to lay down, in a figurative fashion of course, his life for the freedom of Moslems in the Soviet Union and in Afghanistan to worship their God – it was heartbreaking what the communists were doing, and how about Stalin? - and found the mosques a most reassuring way of taking back a young generation into the anti-atheist, anti-materialist fold.

There is nothing more rotten and hypocritical than an empire covering its ass. It employs, for this purpose, a certain kind of intellectual – whose credentials are enhanced by an early 20s bout of radicalism. All the better – as they bloat and grope through their subsequent careers, they get extra points for the signs they once painted at that protest in was it 1967? But they are, in general, creeps. Nothing but creeps. Berman, purveyor of a creep version of intellectual history that pleases the crewe at TNR and the NYT magazine, is just the kind of walking absurdity who one expects to see in a corrupt era of imperial overreach and decline.

Our present

2010-06-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

There’s a charming story in Jennifer Burns’ biography of Ayn Rand, “Goddess of the Market”. In the dark days of the New Deal, when Roosevelt was collectivizing the U.S. economy, Rand’s first books obtained for her a circle of admirers heavily salted with the various Babbits and small business owners who’d been abused by the first generation of American naturalists. Among them, one, a letterhead manufacturer, wrote to her that her novel, We the Living, had aroused him to the depths of his being: “ ‘I thought I was one of the few who was really awake. I thought I knew and appreciated what we have, but now I know that I was at least half asleep.” Midway through the novel, Emery paused to inspect his full refrigerator, newly grateful for the bounty contained therein.”

I am not exaggerating when I say that I paused, after this paragraph, and distinctly heard the ghost of Flaubert screaming in pained laughter. Homais, of course, is eternal.

And yet… Surely our letterhead manufacturer was not wrong to inspect his refrigerator searching for clues to his way of life. Where he may have erred, however, is in thinking that Rand’s wavering historical light would have explained that bounty in any way. Rand would not have understood the collaborations – the mixture of state purposes and corporate logic – that provided the framework for the generation of refrigerants that were invented after WWI, nor would she have understood just how much of the railroad system that brought beef and veggies to Ohio in midwinter had been created out of government grants of land that it possessed by main force – and that it was beginning to support with the boldest socialistic ploy of the era, the price supports for farmers, which, combined with the engineering of the U.S. water supply, was instrumental in dropping U.S. food prices – as well as in creating nationwide corn obesity.

All of which, in some ways, doesn’t matter. The great Enlightenment ideal of prosperity reaching down into the ranks of the lowest and the most humble has been realized to an astonishing degree in developed 20th century economies – and as it is realized, a strange thing has happened. As populations get richer, they get both more timid and more savage – they feel ever more vulnerable, and are made ever less able to understand the narrative that leads to the refrigerator; they lose all sense of sacrifices that lead to long term collective benefits, which requires a historical narrative, and they operate on short term fantasies that are ceaselessly reinforced by the stream of media that fills their days. Liberty, republican virtue, culture, science – the accompaniments, according to the Enlightenment thinkers, of opulence – slowly lose their capacity to arouse any feeling whatsoever. Like a monster, an engulfing private life, rising up from the refrigerator and the Rand epic, creates a sort of public viciousness – fed by the sweetmeats of bourgeois living.

Mr. Emery, in his own way, saw the future. Our present is now filled with Emerys, and they weigh upon us like a nightmare.

Our Humean rulers

2010-05-28T15:21:00.000-07:00

The first time it struck me that the governing class in this country had embraced Hume's account of cause and effect was in the runup to the Iraq invasion. The military testified, out of their experience, that the occupation of a country the size of Iraq would certainly take 400 + thousand soldiers, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. This was immediately dismissed by the pro-war side, who had only contempt for the idea of cause and effect contained in this narrative. For them, cause and effect were simply constructed by custom, and thus infinitely subject to spin. Thus they set about designing and implementing an action (the cause) and pretended that no effect would occur - rather, we would find that Iraqis loved being invaded, that they would gladly pay us for the privilege of being invaded (which was, literally, what Wolfowitz told Congress) and that we could withdraw within three or four months. As these things didn't come to pass (along with many other things that didn't come to pass - flying horses, dancing sugarplumbs, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney), the elite decided the best policy was drift and obscure - drift along in the hope that something would happen, and obscure what was really happening.

The Murder of the Gulf of Mexico has the same structure. A progressive chattering class has let its mind drift to other things, hoping - for no good reason except the repetition of this by spokesmen in the news - that BP, which had caused the accident with no contingency plan, would whip one up in a heartbeat. Meanwhile, that the Obama administration simply let BP lie about the extent of the flow into the Gulf was part of the m.o. of - we can do nothing! A curious stance. In a world of hundreds of oil companies, many with deepsea experience, and with resources that allow us to buy up a trillion dollars of dirty 'securities' from the banks, we suddenly have neither a navy nor any other reserve of experience to call upon except that of BP, our hero.

The startling thing was that the same people who are ardent political junkies seemed to blank out the consequences of the spill. Cause, here, would simply lead to some spinnable opportunities. So we don't measure the outflow for 35 days, and even now have what is surely a lowball estimate - we don't call in the boats we have on hand and investigate the plumes blooming beneath the Gulf, one of which is spreading Mobile-ward - and we don't envision the effect of this, politically, when, say, Mobile doesn't have any uncontaminated fresh water. After all, cause can be followed, it appears, by anything - maybe Deepwater Horizon will start spewing out Hope you Can Believe in stickers.

I call this Humean, but probably one could analyse this better from the point of view of Piagetian child psychology. Our elites display the intellectual grasp of four year olds, since, after all, they spend their time immersed in atmospheres of entitlement and infantilization. It is interesting to watch the rot.

But sad for the Gulf.

experiment three - crossposted

2010-05-27T10:07:00.001-07:00

experiment three

My last post was not meant to show that Kierkegaard was directly influenced by the Mesmerists, or by the use of hypnosis, when he uses the term psychological experiment – although in fact, as he had taken psychology, he undoubtedly had read something about animal magnetism. But rather I wanted to show links here, chains, connections, intersignes, in which an eighteenth century scene of experiment/seduction is played out on a woman - Puysegur’s patient - who resists him, in the end, allowing him the fetish objects - shoe or bonnet - but nothing more. And I wanted the odd commonality of the fly swatter to stand out - passed from the patient's hand to C.C.'s, chasing after the revolutionary flies of Berlin.

Under the pressure of the observer's gaze, we watch the experiment as a situation under the control of the pseudonym slip out of his hands, and see it appear in Kierkegaard’s hands, where instead of an experiment applied by C.C. to his 'subjects', it is applied to the text itself - the text is an experiment about experiments. And so we have outlined the first problem, the problem of the first page, the problem of the title.

The problem – psychological? Textual? Scientific? then – such is the way of this slippery signifier – seems to slip at this moment, while we are adjusting our glasses, looking at the screen - where we read the text - out of Kierkegaard’s hands too - or out of his control. For what kind of control does our author behind the author have? Why is it that experiment and seduction, experiment and the female, keep finding each other? And not according to the protocols of the manipulated chance in which the experimenter excels, but according to the protocols of nemesis, of fate, of obsession, of luck, it seems. And the experimenter – who is he, and what are his standards? What are his ‘controls”? What is his institutional background?

The institutional background – science, art, religion – is not just a matter of existential stages. Constantine Constantinus, after all, appears so unattached to economic activity, and so, consequently, at leisure to collect cases, a situation that – perhaps – is the reason the young man in Repetition finds him odd – and later on, decides that he is mad. Until, of course, C.C. decides the young man is inexistent. If madness is lack of labor – or if madness is labor that is not socially recognized… And if madness creates situations that are, to the madman’s gaze, experiments, although not so recognized by any others in the social order...

Of course, it is true that this has also happened, in the twentieth century, within institutional psychology. The famous Milgram experiment, for instance, about which one can also ask about its double form – for the participants thought they were in one experiment when they were really in another. They thought they were seeing how much pain a subject could take, when they were really subjects testing how much they would obey an order.

Thus, C.C. is not entirely out of the range of experimenters, eccentric and fictional as he is, eccentric and fictional as they represent themselves. But surely we have seen this psychological experimenter/seducer before, and not as a premonition of our own actuality, but as a figure from the eighteenth century past – for the adventurer develops just such a cold aesthetic objectivity in order to be able to travel between classes and principalities. There is a transformation of types, here, a transubstatantiation – from Don Giovanni to Dupin. C.C. is, in fact, one of those figures that hover around the idea of the detective – that amateur of crime.

How a word will creep into a text. How a word will creep into my ear and down into my heart. All this creeping about.

In the Concept of Anxiety, the psychological observer is described as a sort of actor – or rope dancer. I’ll translate from the German text I have:

“Whoever is concerned in high style with psychology and psychological observation has to take on himself a general human suppleness that puts him in the position to shape his examples right away, and these then have a whole other power of proof, although they don’t possess the appearance of facticity. As the psychological observer must possess a more than rope dancerish nimbleness in order to throw himself imaginatively into people and be able to mimic their attitudes; as his silence in confidential moments must have something seductive and pleasant, so that the disclosed matter can find comfort in this fact, under this artfully brought about inconspicuousness and stillness, and creep out and to unburden itself as in a soliloquy: he must in his soul possess a poetic originality, in order to be able to form all at once, out of that which always presents itself all in pieces and irregularly to the individual, a totality and regularity.”

Two shadows seem to appear to us on the edge of this text. One is Freud – notice how this sketch, which seems to reach out to the psychoanalytic technique of Uebertragen, even denies personhood to the discloser, but instead speaks as though the disclosed were an Es, a thing within the person. The other shadow is given to us by a story that appeared in 1841 on the other side of the Atlantic:

“A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, 'the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;'—he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even;'—he guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed 'lucky,'—what, in its last analysis, is it?"
"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent."
"It is," said Dupin; "and, upon inquiring, of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella."

Carte de la retourne.

Brownie's back

2010-05-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

I’m going to make a hazardous prediction: more than the economy, it is the murder of the Gulf of Mexico which will decide the elections of 2010.

In the broad sweep of history, or even the small vision of a mouse from a mousehole, American elections are a trivial and sickening event. Especially in balance with the incredible damage wrought by a sugar intoxicated, irresponsible, and servile population, in the throes of some regression to the feudal era by way of worship of the wealthy.

But however trivial the measuring instrument, the object is immense. The object here, of course, is the destruction of a 50 million year eco-system on a scale not scene in the Gulf region since a comet slammed into the coast of Yucatan 65 million years ago.

This is the size of the crime.

Obama took office and immediately disappointed his liberal supporters by, in general, continuing all the disastrous policies of the Bush years under the guise of ‘stability’ and the magic belief in the ‘free market’, in spite of the fact that the corruption, inefficiency, rent seeking, and ill effects of that market were naked for all to see. Still, his supporters – and I’d count myself as nominally one, since I will probably vote for him – swallowed every insult. So far, his strong card has been his calm, and his confidence. Those two things seemed to indicate that at least we were being ruled by a competent president.

The death of the Gulf, which is going to go on and on this summer and fall, will unwind this image.

Now, make no mistake. There are no solutions that are even close to being realized. The details of the capping process for Wednesday have, unsurprisingly, been kept under wraps, since, as has become clear, all these repairing moves are improvisations devised by people who never mapped out any disaster scenario. The press, in its infinite gullibility, likes to tell us that a new well is being drilled to relieve the old well, and that by August the gusher will be capped. What is lost in this discussion is that the new well is being drilled in the same deep water environment, with an even greater lack of safety provisions, in greater haste, by a company that still doesn’t understand how it blew up the Deepwater Horizon well. It is as if a drunk driver who crashed into your car now offered, whilst glugging a bottle of whiskey, to make amends by driving you home.

So – assuming, as I think is reasonable, that the current volume of flow into the Gulf is between 60 and 100, 000 barrels per day – we are speaking of a summer event that will burn itself even into the inane and addled mind of homo americanus, circa 2010.

At a certain point, the p.r. hallucinations will melt away. At a certain point, the giggly story about how BP is going to use dog hair and golf balls to plug the ‘leak’ will give way to stories about communities evacuating because their water source is contaminated. At a certain point, the dispersants poisoning the water will give way to vast rafts consisting of dead fish, dolphins, sea turtles and the like. At a certain point the humble, disposable Cajun fisherman ( an example of what the AEC would call “low use humans”, as they approved tests that shook fallout over poor southern Utah residents and other worthless scum) will give way to more suburban identifiable retired couples, looking in dismay as their beachfront property becomes a toxic dump.

Today one sensed a definite interior movement. Surely the White House knows that the interview with Admiral Allen, their point man in the Gulf, was a Brownie style disaster. Reading the transcript, one can even imagine the Admiral sitting there with a BP gimme cap on. Two parts stand out: once, when the Admiral claims that he can get “answers” from the BP CEO Tony Hayward – which avoids the problem of whether the answers are true or not, since they are almost certainly lies; the other part deserves to be quoted for pure farce:

“Allen compared the battle to contain the spill and its spreading slick to "fighting a multi-front war". He added that when the leak was finally sealed, the total amount of oil spilled would "probably start to approach" the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, the worst U.S. oil spill. The tanker accident spilled 11 million gallons (41 million litres) of crude.”

This kind of lie takes one back to the good old Bush days – indeed, I think it has the ring of authentic Rumsfeldianism. There isn’t a scientist outside of BP who believes that the estimate of 5,000 barrels a day, which the press swallowed for almost two weeks, is even remotely true. What we saw there was a rare, televised bout of regulatory capture. It should be shown to classes on the topic. It was outrageous, it was pitiful, and it will do a lot of damage to Obama’s white house. More, I think, than they know.

Behind every great fortune, Balzac said, there is a great crime. He was speaking of the Napoleonic era – in our era we can say, there is a great environmental crime. This looks to be a world class crime. As there is no real leftist discourse in the U.S., it will be an event that nobody can talk about. But I can suggest some vocabulary: nationalization; seizure of assets; the nationalization of every deepwater drilling project from now on out; the cancellation of all deep water drilling projects until there are failsafe procedures; the investment, by the government, in that emergency capacity; and the entire overthrow of the corporate and oligarchic control of our political apparatus. And, for good measure, lets us throw in the words exploitation, surplus value, social costs, government organized and financed crash programs to develop alternative energy sources, and a regulatory apparatus to control and oversee, with intense and irritating attention, the petro giants. Take down the latter, or live in a world that smells and feels like a giant toilet.

America: tops in sycophancy again!

2010-05-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite newsstory genres is the always tricky report about the pelf being swallowed by that cute class of mediocrities we so fondly call upper management. Compared to the American oligarchs, the French nobility even during its dimmest hours looks like an orb of intelligence. True, the French nobility inherited their wealth and never, during their lifetimes, did much of public benefit, besides hiring the right managers. But they had a code, they flung themselves into the problems of love, conversation, and enlightenment, and they did have the common sense to commit collective suicide during the early days of the French revolution.

But don’t expect 18th century radicalism from the newspapers, that school of sycophancy and conventional wisdom. They believe that our modern oligarchs have godlike powers. They “cut.” They “build”. If a company’s stock grows by 100 percent during the tenure of X, well surely it must be due to X! The logic, here, is behind that of the 18th century – more like the 12th century faith in the power of demons and saints. However, the newspapers draw the line at extending their indulgent romanticism – for instance, I have never read a business column that suggested cashiers should get to pocket 10 percent of their ‘revenue’. Why, there’s no correspondence between what the cashier does and the line that forms behind her!

We have to know when to be 12th century and when to be 21st century if we are going to keep our neo-feudalism going.

And so we come to a delightful story on the fortunes doled out to media CEOS. As you might expect, in tough times, we really have to tighten our belts. We have to fire. We have to cut back. And we have to --- well, give 50 percent more to our beloved CEO! Its fun, and it is only money.

“Top executives at the country’s largest media companies continued to reel in multimillion-dollar pay packages in 2009, a year of widespread cost-cutting throughout the industry. In several cases, the packages even increased from the year before.
At the top of the list is Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, whose pay package in 2009 totaled almost $43 million, more than twice what he made in 2008, according to an analysis by Equilar, anexecutive compensation research firm.
Not far behind was Viacom’s chief executive, Philippe P. Dauman, who was paid nearly $34 million, a 22 percent increase over 2008. Sumner M. Redstone, who controls CBS and Viacom, was paid more than $33 million from the two companies combined.”

These things are pleasing to the Lord – pull out your average economist and he could get starry eyed, explaining it all. The wonders of the system! The rewards accruing to the just! The only fly in the ointment is this dang deficit hanging over everyone – why, it might turn out that the government will start coming in and asking for .01% more from our superior class, which would be an injustice on the scale, as one conservative activist put it, of the Holocaust.

This genre of story always presents two sides: the side of the rich investors and the side of the rich management. The two sides that count in this fair principality.
But I am always impressed by the abject lyricism of the defenders of Big Wealth. And this article ends with a cherry for me!

But first, here’s the rich investor point of view, which is blasé:

“The media industry did rebound in 2009 after a particularly tough 2008, but for many companies that largely meant cutting expenses, including labor costs. Overall revenue declines remained commonplace, but in many cases profits rose.
At Viacom, revenue in 2009 declined 7 percent compared with the year before but the company’s profit rose to $1.6 billion, a 29 percent increase, not far off from Mr. Dauman’s 22 percent pay raise. CBS returned to profitability in 2009 — $227 million — after a huge write-down in 2008.
“Right now, the executive compensation is not what’s driving people to invest or not invest in these stocks,” said Rich Greenfield, a media analyst at BTIG in New York. “Shareholders are more focused on the underlying growth prospects of the companies than executive compensation.”

And here’s the cherry!

“Several analysts said the shifting marketplace and uncertainty surrounding the media business could actually contribute to the large payouts, making companies even more determined to hold on to people they see as gifted executives.
“When you have an industry going through so much tumult, it puts upward pressure on pay because so many people are moving around,” said Don Delves, the president of the Delves Group, a compensation consulting firm in Chicago. “People are looking around a lot, people are moving around and there’s a concern about losing talent.””

Oh that talent! Its so… delightful!

open letter to jean-luc marion

2010-04-11T16:37:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking for the past week about the Appel à la vérité, signed by certain French intellectuals, and notably by a philosopher whose name is associated with Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, and directed – as any call to the truth should be – to the affair now engulfing the Catholic Church.

And I've been thinking I would like to write a letter to Jean-Luc Marion. A letter about his signature, his signing off on, this petition.

One would think such an appeal would concern itself with certain truths that have come to light about the world of children and priests – the world of a certain culture of education, of religious instruction. One would think the truths about this world might be truths that call out. That should be called out. One would think that such a bold appeal – an appeal to the very truth itself, or for the truth – would get down on its knees and examine the ways and wherefores of the truth. Here, for instance, is a truth that needed to be heard. A truth that did not get to cry out. But which was, like the appeal, a matter of signatures, apparently:

“Last month it emerged that in 1975 Cardinal Brady, then a canon lawyer in the diocese of Kilmore, took part in an investigation involving two young people who alleged abuse by Smyth.

He believed both were telling the truth and swore them to secrecy.

He reported his findings to the then bishop of Kilmore Francis McKiernan, who removed from Smyth any rights to exercise priestly ministry in the diocese. The bishop also reported the then Fr Brady’s findings to Smyth’s superiors at the Norbertine abbey in Kilnacrott, Co Cavan.

No one involved informed gardaí or any civil authorities. Smyth continued to abuse children until 1993.”

Of course, the truths here, and our access to them – have indeed suffered Truth can bleed - and if one thinks that Jesus was the truth, this bleeding is not a metaphorical matter. But in deadly earnest.

Here is how this bleeding truth was replied to, by the good Irish Bishops. They have not denied this truth. No, they have simply found that nowadays, the truth, whether it bleeds or not, can always be spun.

THE IRISH Bishops’ Conference yesterday distributed a press release drawing attention to an article published 13 years ago, in which the current controversy surrounding Cardinal Seán Brady was first reported.

The story, which appeared in the London edition of the Sunday Mirror on August 10th, 1997, ran under the headline Archbishop Brady knew about evil Smyth for 22 years; The story that will shock Ireland.

The opening line of the article, by journalist Declan White, reported that archbishop Seán Brady, helped investigate “sex abuse monster” Fr Brendan Smyth.

“He was part of a secret tribunal which failed to notify the police after an altar boy told how pervert priest Smyth had abused him,” it said. It went on to mention one child who Cardinal Brady interviewed about allegations of sexual abuse perpetrated by Smyth in 1975, quoting the man, who they reported lived in England at the time of publication:

“He claims the tribunal told him that such abuse would never happen again and that the church ‘would sort things out’.”

While the article referred to the meeting as a “secret tribunal” there was no specific mention of the oath of secrecy, which it later transpired that two children were required to take.

A spokesman from the Catholic Communications Office said last night that there had been suggestions that the story had been covered up but this was not the case.
“There were questions in the media as to why this issue hadn’t been addressed heretofore ... just to demonstrate that this is not a new story. It was reported in the 1990s.”

Such is the respect of the Catholic Bishops for the truth that they take comfort in the fact that parts of this truth were exposed in 1997. Which of course - as is the way of truth - might make us want to ask questions about the Church response in 1997. One truth leads to another, and all truths, here, lead to silence and dead ends.

Some - not apparently Jean-Luc Marion - might say that this appeal to the truth - the appeal of the Irish Bishops - is childishly dishonest, an insult not only to the truth but to the moral responsibility with which the truth has so often been linked. Some would say that bishops who run a church ought to try to adhere to a moral code somewhat stricter than that of a Chicago Mafioso, pleading double jeapordy. Some might ask for more from the truth – some might ask for more truth itself. But this is to assume that the truth is for all –even children who sign oaths under the eyes of a priest that they will reveal to nobody that another priest raped them. This egalitarianism of the truth is, according to the new appeal for the truth, a childish naivete.

Yet such are the mysteries here that as the truth is called to, it look more and more like a lie. Like a lie piled on another lie. Like a lie upon which a whole career in the church was built. A career that Cardinal Brady sees no particular reason to give away now.

“On Tuesday, the Catholic Church in Ireland released more details about why Cardinal Brady asked the two victims, aged 10 and 14, to sign secrecy agreements.
The church said two boys were asked to sign oaths "to avoid potential collusion" in evidence-gathering.

It added this would ensure that the complaints could "withstand challenge."
The church statement does not explain why either Cardinal Brady or his superiors at the time did not share their information with the police.” BBC

This is not to say that these truths, in the appeal to truth signed by Jean-Luc Marion, are not given their rightful place in the appeal to the truth. It is to say that their place is, it turns out, as subordinate as that of children ordered to keep a secret. These are the truths of those who are last, and under the new dispensation celebrated by the signatories of the appeal to the truth, those who are last on earth will remain last in the kingdom of heaven, their rapes to be forever put under seal; and all pity, when the seal breaks, to be directed at the real victims in these transactions – the Catholic hierarchy. Which apparently has been instrumental in revealing the truth – a new truth indeed. To quote the beginning of the appeal:

“Les affaires de pédophilie dans l’Église sont, pour tous les catholiques, une source de peine profonde et de douleur extrême. Des membres de la hiérarchie de l’Église ont eu, sur certains dossiers, de graves manquements et dysfonctionnements, et nous saluons la volonté du pape de faire toute la lumière sur ces affaires.”

The pedophilia scandals in the Church are, for all catholics, a source of profound pain and extreme grief. Members of the Church hierarchy have, according to certain dossiers, had grave lacks and dysfunctions, and we salute the will of the pope to throw every light over these affairs.”

Interestingly, the Irish bishops apparently didn’t get the news that it was the Pope's blessed will to the truth was at work here - as we saw above, they have been pointing the exculpatory finger at earlier newspaper reports. Maybe Pope Benedict did not pore over those newspapers when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, it was his job to oversee the functioning of the priesthood – to expel those who violated the rules. Or maybe it was a slow, slow truth – and what could be slower than a truth that has been put under seal? In fact, this truth was so slow that Smythe, who Brady knew was a pedophile, continued to operate for twenty years in Ireland. Ireland is a large island, but one would think that a man who was interested in the truth, and whose story is that the children were asked to shut up for their own good, might even be so interested as to make sure that Smythe was punished to the extent that the Church was willing to go – of course, I am not speaking of going to the authorities. Rape is, after all, a legal offense only for laymen. I am speaking of quietly kicking good father Smythe out of the church.

But - in asking these questions, apparently one shows oneself an enemy to truth, or at least this new view of the truth according to Jean-Luc Marion. And yet, what can I do? Surely a letter, another appeal, and appeal to the appealers, is in order? For surely, such is the infinite force of an appeal to the truth that it will provoke other appeals, appeals without limit, appeals that also might even carry a truth or two. Yet my appeal has, apparently, fallen into the trap that has been laid by the press:

At the same time, we deplore the media obsession and exaggeration which accompanies these scandals. Beyond the right to information, legitimate and democratic, we can’t help but observe with sadness, as Christians but principally as citizens, that numerous medias in our country (and in the Occident in general) treat these scandals with a partiality, distortion or delectation. Of these recourses to generalizations, the portrait of the church which is made in the current press doesn’t correspond to that which is lived by Catholic Christians.”

(Dans le même temps, nous regrettons l’emballement et la surenchère médiatiques qui accompagnent ces affaires. Au-delà du droit à l’information, légitime et démocratique, nous ne pouvons que constater avec tristesse, en tant que chrétiens mais surtout en tant que citoyens, que de nombreux médias dans notre pays (et en Occident en général) traitent ces affaires avec partialité, méconnaissance ou délectation. De raccourcis en généralisations, le portrait de l’Église qui est fait dans la presse actuellement ne correspond pas à ce que vivent les chrétiens catholiques.}

The truth has always done battle with the stereotype, or the hasty generalization. But here one wonders if the truth recognizes in the last lukewarm phrase – "what is lived by catholic Christians" – its alter-ego, the big lie. Or rather, excuse me, the banal lie. The lie being of course that this was not lived by catholic Christians – that the numerous rapes, stories of groping of all type, the preying on children – was not lived by a community of Catholic Christian children. Yet, with the naivete to which the banal lie is heir, this does announce a truth – for how could such things be “lived”?

Indeed, such are the philosophical heights we have ascended to. This should attract - appeal to - our Jean-Luc Marion as he makes a successful career – a living – of being much lauded, of having a seat at the University of Chicago and the honor of being a member of the Academie Francais. He certainly lives. Yet it is a life in which he might think to take time out – I would think maybe one thousand or one hundred thousand times the time he took to affix his signature to this appeal to the truth – to ask himself a few questions about the living and the dead in his church.

I am reminded of a passage in Simone Weil’s Enracinement – a book she wrote as she was contemplating becoming part of that living community of Catholic Christians – a passage which, though about the social experience of labor, might have some small, small relevance here. Weil balances the need to be rooted with the society of deracinement – a society that is produced, Weil believes, when all threads to the past are systematically snipped. And in working out her “program” for what should be done about this, she speaks, naturally, of the working class – whose children, in Ireland, were, as we know, subjected to the tender mercies of the Christian Brothers in the 1950s. She writes this:

The concrete list of the workers griefs offered that of things to modify. First, it is necessary to suppress the shock that the small child receives at twelve or thirteen, who goes from the school and enters the factory. Certain workers would be completely happy if that shock had not forever left an always painful wound; but they do not know themselves that their suffering comes from the past. The child at school, a good or bad student, was a being whose existence was recognized, whom one sought to develop, with whom one made an appeal to his best sentiments. The next day he becomes a supplement to a machine, a little less than a thing, and nobody cares if he obeys from the lowest motives so long as he obeys. Most workers have been subjected to the impression at least in this moment of their life of no longer existing, accompanied by a sort of inner vertigo, that intellectuals or the bourgeois, even in the greatest suffering, rarely have the occasion to get acquainted with.”

Ah, that moment of no longer existing – could this be the secret that is put under seal by a certain man who now wears, and seems intent on continuing to wear, his Cardinal’s regalia? But Jean-Luc Marion might point out that many,many expressions of regret have poured out of the Vatican by the man who has the "will" to “throw light on these affairs” - especially after the light has been thrown on them from other sources. And regret has been expressed by Cardinal Brady as well. Such heartfelt words! God himself doesn't ask for so much!

One notices, however, that the deep grief and regret felt by the signers of the appeal, including you, Jean-Luc Marion, has not resulted in any specific citation of the matter at hand. The appearance of the 'facts", the object of scandal, has been discretely pluralized and made into "affairs". Dreadful, no doubt, but not the kind of things to pollute an appeal to the truth. And yet, suppose, just suppose, that these scandals created a lifelong wound. Suppose even, as truth cries to truth, wound cries to wound - and abuse seeks to replicate itself in the next generation and the next. Suppose for a moment that Weil is right, and that the oppression of the factory system creates a feeling of inexistence - and suppose such blows against the child who, good or bad student, has been led to believe that he or she is recognized, comes from the teacher himself, whose power is expended in destroying utterly that confidence that one can be recognized.

And yet here I am going on like this when the appealers have already said how they were pained. They were pained for three paragraphs. They were pained, but more painful has been the 'delectations' of the press. So much is not said about pain in this appeal! Or even, for an appeal to the truth, about truth. It is admirably brief. One would almost think that the truth being appealed to might look at the grief felt by the signatories as pro forma. One might almost think that, in the attack on the press, you – Jean-Luc Marion – are not signing an appeal to the truth at all, but rather an appeal to allow the most powerful to escape with no sense of what they have done in the past, and no limit to what they can do in the future. In short, it is an appeal that stems from a lack of contrition so profound, from a feeling of worldly security that is so guarded on all sides against any question, any invasion, that it reverses one of Jesus’ sayings:

“Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?”

For if, of course, the stone and serpent were given, regrettably, a reasonable number of years ago, and it was not the further responsibility of he who gave the stone and the serpent to oversee the boy who received them, how can he - Cardinal Brady - be blamed? And so hard he has worked to become Cardinal! Think of his sacrifices.

Well, I can think of nothing more to say to you, Jean-Luc Marion (if this were an open letter) who have given your signature and, apparently, know all about the truth that is “lived” by the Catholic Christian community.

And yet, doesn’t that truth that is actually a lie turn sour in your stomach? Have you really studied and worked hard yourself - like Cardinal Brady, becoming an important man - to do this kind of cover work for a corrupt establishment? Is this “truth” really worth the bargain here, spoken of by Christ, for which one trades a certain piece of the truth - the soul - for the world?
Yours,
Roger Gathman

a last chance for changing the 50 dollar bill

2010-04-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

I do like Matt Taibbi. But sometimes I think he misses a trick or two – that he could easily have avoided by reading me. In his latest column, he strikes gold – or, what is even more valuable for a satirist, fool’s gold – in the latest ‘conversation’ between David Brooks and Gail Collins. The two NYT columnist speak of the great events of the week – such as the Duke Butler basketball game – and Brooks wraps himself up in a visionary frenzy:

David Brooks: “The rich are not always spoiled. Their success does not always derive from privilege. The Duke players — to the extent that they are paragons of privilege, which I dispute — won through hard work on defense.

Gail Collins: I’m sorry, when the difference is one weensy basket, I’d say Duke won neither by privilege nor hard work but by sheer luck. But don’t let me interrupt your thought here. I detect the subtle and skillful transition to a larger non-sport point.

David Brooks: Yes. I was going to say that for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?”

Taibbi – as any sentient human being below the 250 thou per year level, which includes 99 percent of the world’s population – finds Brooks’ comment, on the one hand, sublimely funny, and on the other hand, a troping of the word ‘work’ that most of us would kill to be able to so trope:

“I would give just about anything to sit David Brooks down in front of some single mother somewhere who’s pulling two shitty minimum-wage jobs just to be able to afford a pair of $19 Mossimo sneakers at Target for her kid, and have him tell her, with a straight face, that her main problem is that she doesn’t work as hard as Jamie Dimon.

Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.”

Although heartfelt, Taibbi’s wish scenario is a little too, shall we say, lacking in ferocity.

To get to the servility complex, here, that allows the middle class to look up to its predators, who are even now actively digging the middle class grave, one has to put a bony skeletal finger in their very heart, or up their very rectum. My own bony finger was lodged as far up that rectum, at Limited Inc, for as long as I could stand it. Perhaps I lost my sense of humor in trying to mix proctology and memento mori – but in any case, surely, to speak of the industrious rich, one has to speak of one of the 00s most outstanding predator – of course, I’m speaking of former head of Exxon, Lee R. Raymond, and his pay package, which amounted to $144,573 a Day.

I went into the science of his pay package in 2006:

“For the better understanding of this great man’s tres riches heures, remember that each day includes lunch and, surely, a pee and a dump. Now, given that Raymond is in his sixties, I imagine that a dump takes about ten minutes. Of course, he could have had some young Brazilian man’s rectum transplanted into his (no doubt, you can check Exxon’s quarterly reports to see – such an operation would surely be a courtesy given by the company, for services rendered, rather than being paid for straight out of his own compensation package – but until better information, I will put it at ten minutes). I’m including wiping and washing the hands – something his fourth wife has surely taught him by now.

So, a full Raymond dump is worth more money than I made last year. Or is it about the same? In any case, your average Cameroonian or Egyptian or Sri Lankan doesn’t make near a Raymond dump. I would put them at half a Raymond pee.”

My calculation was I think off – it really took two dumps by Raymond to equal what I made in 2006. But I am pretty sure a Raymond pee was equal to the year’s earning of an Egyptian. As for Taibbi’s minimum wage woman, I’d put her at three Raymond shits.
The culture of the 00s hasn’t changed a bit, except that all the Raymonds were in danger of losing their money in 2008, so Obama took a bullet for the team and made Wall Street’s financial sector realize that they have friends in D.C.

Which is why it is more urgent than ever that, with the current dispute about putting Reagan on the fifty dollar bill, my plea is heard!

“… we could order the finest engravers of the greatest Republic the world has ever seen to render, in full, rich detail one of the great Raymond dumps, substituting for a history we don't remember a sign and symbol we all revere, a veritable american eucharist? I hasten to add, not a scape of the whole mass and accumulation of excretia. Currency is meant to be exchanged, and we don’t need bills that high. I was thinking, however, that to honor the magic of the marketplace, of which the U.S. is a veritable monument and museum, that one finely etched turd, one rich, ravishing portion of the great man’s scat, could, perhaps, take the place of paltry Grant. For smaller denominations, I would suggest we send some of the great chefs with their finest cutlery to slice into appropriate portions that product of great man's dyspepsia. A portion of the turd on the one, the five, the twenty-five and the fifty would remind us by its majestic look in whose country we have temporary residence.“

Obama and Sun Tzu

2010-03-22T10:38:00.001-07:00

Today I’ll celebrate Obama, rather than, as has been my habit over the past year, knocking him.

Obama’s campaign was impressive for exactly the reason that – in the final stretch of the healthcare debate – Obama’s renewed energy in pressing for the House bill was impressive. The reason is easy to find, as all readers of Francois Jullien’s Treatise on Efficiency know – Obama – and in this he is like Lincoln – is very much a Chinese strategist:

Two different modes of efficacy result from these two different logics [of the Western strategists and Sun Tzu] on the one hand, the relation of means to ends with which we in the West are the more familiar; on the other, a relation between conditions and consequences, which is favored by the Chinese. When strategy consists in getting a situation to evolve in such a way that, if one allows oneself to be carried along by it, the effect results naturally from the accumulated potential of the situation, there is no longer any need to choose (between means) or to struggle in order to attain an ‘end’. Abandoning the logic of model-making (founded on the construction of an ideal end), you can switch to the logic of a process (note the importance of ze, “as a result”, in the construction of Chinese discourse). On the one side, the causal system is open and complex, and an infinite number of combinations are possible; oin the other, the process is closed, and its result is implicit in its evolution.”

When Obama dismisses D.C. and the political entertainment industry, this is what he means. The enemy must take a position, while Obama waits for a situation. The GOP has taken the position of pure opposition to any healthcare bill. What this position really means is that the GOP is defending the present system. Obama took the situation – the discontent with the system, and the manifest fears of not being insured, along with rising insurance rates – and simply let it develop as his argument. However, to remain master of the situation, one must look within and understand your own relationship to it. Obama failed to do this – in essence, he nearly shoaled the situation by negotiating with the GOP. The loss of the Senate seat in Massachussetts was actually a good thing for Obama – it taught him that the situation was not changing towards what he wanted, but away from what he wanted. He had lost his formerly correct sense of how to press on the situation.

That sense is not created in the political entertainment industry or in response to it. Obama and his people are not at all the instant response kind, vide Clinton’s people. In this way, they let the enemy forces stake their position. By negotiating with the GOP, Obama helped them hide their position behind mere opposition to the bill. This almost cost him the whole campaign. But the bill’s passage is a turning point. For opposition to a bill in process is much different than repealing a bill that has been passed – the latter requires that you enumerate what is wrong with the bill, and explain why you want to sacrifice such things as the reform of the pre-existing condition part of the bill. At this point the enemy has to ride the situation they have created.

The healthcare bill is not the only battle being fought, of course. Jullien points out the five-fold conditions that are laid down by the Chinese strategists – some of which are natural (the weather) and some of which are subject to human change (the ground). The natural condition at the moment is the economy, with its horrendous unemployment figures and the fact that 25 million homeowners are a little or way below the value of the house that they are paying the banks for. Surely the waste of last year should bring wrath down upon the incumbents – which are majority Dem. But having passed a bill that was so fiercely opposed, the Dems might have gotten a taste for rushing into battle. In which case, they might have a chance in November.

ritual of not seeing iraq

2010-03-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

I have a bad habit of dropping issues where I simply get crazier and crazier in response to the mirages manufactured by our governors. I had to get off the subject of Iraq the way some men have to get off the booze.

But occasionally I return. Returning, I see that the same mirages, shabby at the edges and full of bullet holes, are still floated by the ever clueless American press. The foreign correspondents for the NYT, the Washington Post, and the tv media (from what I can tell from the blogs – I’m not dumb enough to actually watch tv news) have, since 2003, been searching the length and breadth of Iraq, trying to assemble a picture of public opinion – as long as that public opinion spoke English, was pro-American, and had a proper appreciation of free enterprise. Now, it so happens that there were two class features of the Iraq war.

1. The professional class, being heavily Sunni or involved in one way or another with the Ba’ath regime that ruled the country for fifty years, fled. They didn’t have a lot of choice. As the professional class in all third world countries forms the natural constituency for free enterprising pro-Americanism, at the very onset of the war, Bush and Co. destroyed its natural allies – and, such was their ignorance, did not understand what they were doing.
2. The majority of Iraqis are poor, and the vast majority speak no English. They live in areas that are shirked by the newsman who wants to preserve his life. And when he meets their spokesmen, they repulse him. They aren’t at all the kind of starry eyed exile type that make the newsman feel like a liberator.

In the Iraqi elections of 2005, as I pointed out countless times on Limited Inc., these two factors came in to utterly confound the news coverage received in America. Thus, I counted up, at one point, some vast number of references to Chalabi via Factiva – was it 20,000? – and an almost comic number of references to Maliki – maybe 100. Chalabi, as it turned out, received something like .01 percent of the vote. The NYT, on the eve of the 2005 election, published a confident news story about the three men most likely to be prime minister of Iraq. In fact, none of the men even came close.

Because the news model of today is based on Love Story’s definition of love – news is never having to say you’re sorry – the NYT learned precisely nothing from this prestigatator’s debacle. Thus, once again, as the Iraqis prepared to vote, the reporters gave us starry eyed portraits of Allawi and such. So, when the vote came, they reacted as though some sudden earthquake had opened up under their feet. In fact, the vote was predictable: poor shi’ites support, and have supported, Sadr.

“The followers of Moktada al-Sadr, a radical cleric who led the Shiite insurgency against the American occupation, have emerged as Iraq’s equivalent of Lazarus in elections last week, defying ritual predictions of their demise and now threatening to realign the nation’s balance of power.”

The unspecified “ritual predictions of their demise” is, I suppose, a way of saying, we fucked up again, and we always fuck up. Anthony Shadid has covered Iraq long enough to shake hands with the class composition of Iraqi politics. Myself, I have never been to Iraq, but have absorbed the pertinent facts about the place long ago. Of course, I am not equipped with the upper class American innocence that keeps away any fact that does not align with current status quo in America – one in which newsmen routinely show that they think the median income in the U.S. is 100,000 per year.

The uppercrust has compromised with the irreality of ‘meritocracy’ by pretending it is all true. That upward social mobility in the U.S. is trending towards the Mexican model is not something they can either accept or even see. The predator class spawned by Reaganism has, like any predator class, made itself a media bubble in which it gets all the facts that are fit to think – and not a fact more.

Shadid continues:

“Their apparent success in the March 7 vote for Parliament — perhaps second only to the followers of Prime MinisterNuri Kamal al-Maliki as the largest Shiite bloc — underscores a striking trend in Iraqi politics: a collapse in support for many former exiles who collaborated with the United States after the 2003 invasion.
Although rivals disparaged the Sadrists’ election campaign, documents and interviews show an unprecedented discipline that has thrust the group to the brink of perhaps its greatest political influence in Iraq.”

Unprecedented discipline? Rather, the predictable result of the polling booth. Unprecedented discipline will have to be applied in the next year or two, as Maliki joins with the Sunnis and the Iranians to death squad Sadr’s groups into inexistence.

....

For the sake of contrast - oh, that there were the least bit of contrast! - here is what I wrote on Dec. 19, 2005 about the last election:

To understand what is happening in Iraq through the medium of the American press is much like estimating the height of a distant mountain through a heavy fog. But sometimes the fog lifts. This election, for instance, has thrown a startling, and no doubt ephemeral, contrast between the agencies of projection – the media, the D.C. clique, and the Snopes cocoon - and reality. The NYT today, which had based its delusional reporting on John Burns’ paen to the latent Americophilia in the Baghdad streets on election day and an account, echoing an account in the WP, of an obscure secularist candidate in Basra to which reporters had been herded, no doubt, by U.S. army spokesman, now gives us this hilarious phrase:

“What was also apparent was the staunchly religious nature of the electorate, in a country that many experts had proclaimed before the American-led invasion to have a large secular middle class.”

Ah, the passivity of experts, and the coyness of reporters. The machine has written, and having written, passes on.

Still, for that vast, vast minority that actually pays attention, a few things to note.

1. The election was proceeded by the publication of a poll, conducted by the Oxford Research Institute and supported by the BBC, ABC, etc. The poll was much discussed on the blogs. LI thought that the poll vastly overcounted one segment of the Iraqi population – that “large secular middle class.” Well, LI can gleefully say we were right. The ORI poll isn’t even within shooting distance of the results. While that seems a small and parochial thing, it indicates a large and non-parochial matter – the American press, and the American political establishment, simply can’t penetrate to or establish any relationship to an Iraqi populace that, at the moment, is undergoing incipient civil war plus incipient Great Depression. If Iraq really is suffering a rate of unemployment of 60%, the underlying and real American policy towards Iraq – privatize the oil – is a pipe dream. It is not only a pipe dream, but it is being pursued by means that are blowing up in our face.
2. The neurotic pattern for discussing this war is to ignore these moments of clarity and delve, infinitely, into the American cocoon. That is why the hot issue remains the invasion itself, instead of the occupation. LI was opposed to the invasion, but our opposition was not based on what was good for Iraq. It was based on what was good for America. It was good for Iraq that Saddam Hussein fall – that was obvious, and has been obvious. It would have been good for Iraq that Saddam Hussein be captured by Iraqi partisans and be given the Mussolini treatment.
3. However, what was bad for Iraq from the getgo, and is now a disaster for America, was acceding to the imperialist impulse and occupying a country that could handle its own affairs better than any foreign proconsul could. Immediate elections, a cancellation of Iraqi debt and war reparations, and withdrawal of the Coalition forces by the end of 2003 – that would have been the wisest course for both parties.
4. We know how Iraq has suffered due to American incompetence and war crimes. But take a look, for a second, at how American interest has suffered. American interest can’t be to liberalize and seize the oil sources in the Middle East – that will lead to less oil, for one thing, as oil becomes a victim to violence. American interest should be to stabilize the Middle East to the extent that two of the region’s main players, Iran and Israel, come to some non-hostile accord. Instead, this happened: just as the Iranian revolution led to a surge in Islamic fundamentalist violence throughout the region, the American incubation of Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq has been the predictor of the hard line victory in Iran. First Basra, then Teheran – that is the structural logic here. It is, of course, not even seen by Americans who think the world is watching American Idol with breathless anticipation. The world isn’t.
5. To those who think that it is good that America loses in the Middle East, I would ask who bears the cost of that loss. True, American prestige is probably fated to either diminish or transform as time goes on – this is what happens to debt-ridden empires. But American power is a wild card, and simply baiting it is a game in which other people – millions of people – are hurt. And, frankly, living inside the Behemoth, I have no desire for the Behemoth to be scattered to the winds. Jeremiah was ascetic enough to like living in the well into which he’d been thrown – but yours truly likes his trips to Whole Foods. The idea that American losses under Bush give us room to jibe at Bush is, well, a contagious infantile disorder. There is more going on here than sticking it to the retarded Texan. American narcissism knows no ideological boundaries.

PS - those who like their news from Iraq to be all happy and pro-war might be interested in this column in the New York Sun -- which is somewhat to the right of the NYPost -- written by one of those adorable Iraqi bloggers cultivated by the Neocon crowd. Lovely stuff like this:

"Iran's mullahs, who are increasingly getting belligerent across the board, pulled off a coup in Baghdad right under the very noses of the United States."

We also liked the comment about Sistani being a communist. Wow, and I thought the Iraqi communists, solidly supporting Allawi, were proof positive of the new, democratic wave sweeping through the Middle East! I guess it is time for the old switcheroo, and bringing out the commie menace card. We are menaced by the commies that we are fighting for... A little confusing, no? I'm just so... surprised that Chalabi has a constituency of 0.00001 percent in Iraq, when it comes down to it. Gee, besides having guessed it in almost every post I've ever written about Iraq, I gotta say: who coulda guessed it? Especially as the NYT and the Washington Post have featured him with a monomaniacal intensity every time they talk about the political leadership of Iraq. How to put the whole ridiculousness of that? It is as if one were to include a discussion of Jerry Brown in every article about the political leadership of the U.S.

Marx and the discours amoureux

2010-03-14T12:10:00.000-07:00

Crossposted at Limited Inc

Marx is an altogether slippery subject for biography; the reason lies with the biographers. On the subject of Marx, libidinal investment is always just below the surface. Do you want a demon? Fritz Raddatz’s supposed “political biography” of Marx, written during the Cold War, is a hit job by a ‘leftist’ who has been blinded – in the midst of the 1970s – by the brilliant truths of Bakunin. Politics, in other words, as an infantile disorder, which made Raddatz a tool for the Springer media types. He went on to pathographies of Heine, etc. Of the biographies I have picked up so far, I’d recommend Jerome Siegel’s for its judiciousness. Wheen has written a popular biography which makes good points as well. So often, as in the case of Raddatz, one feels like one is reading a flea with rabies – the manic biting into poor dead Karl’s hide is an itchy business.

Of course, the other, hagiographic tendency was its own curse – censoring letters, providing infinite defense lawyer explanations for Marx, and never, ever putting him in historical context – thus pressing him into the stamp album of “heroes” and thus tossing out the window everything he’d ever written about the historical method.

That method, of course, would ask about the material determinants and opportunities within which Marx lived.

One of my favorite essayists, James Buchan, whose book on money, Frozen Desire, is written with a range and a style I absolutely love, falls down on the job, alas, when it comes to Marx. He has the intuition that Marx’s life and Baudelaire’s should be seen together – with which I heartily agree – but then fails to understand both Marx’s life of exile and agitation and – what is worse for the book – Marx’s theory of money. Worse, from his description, one would think that Marx was a humorless and tragic figure – and so one would be, to say the least, surprised that Capital is, among other things, a very funny book – at least the first volume. The humor of political economists is usually as thin and dry as port at the high table, but Marx, with his Goethean culture, is continually surprising the reader with this or that reference or connection.

There’s a much commented upon love letter – a lovely love letter, called, by one of Marx’s cold war commentators, Frank Manuel, with his narc’s vulgate, a “bombastic” love letter – unlike the sweet modest ones that were presumably being penned by the leaders of the Free World at the time - that Marx wrote his wife Jenny from Manchester in 1856. Jenny was in Trier at the time, and Marx evidently missed her – he begins it with the tone he so often takes in letters, of the complaint: “… it annoys me to converse with you all the time in my head without you knowing or hearing or being able to answer me.” Thomas Kemple, in his book on the Grundrisse, Reading Marx writing, puts this letter in relation to Marx’s writing at the time – and one does overhear, even in those common words, a note that is sounded in the Grundrisse and in Capital concerning commodities – they run through our head all the time, and yet they never speak to us. As Kemple points out, the letter, which is an outpouring of love to Jenny mediated through Marx looking at her photograph, is very much about the power of fetishes. This isn’t a Freudian reading – it is a Marxian one. For Marx is teasing himself as well as his wife in this letter:

“Bad as your portrait is, it gives me the best service and I now understand how even “the black Madonna”, the most disgraceful [schimpfiertesten] portraits of the mother of God, can find indestructible admirers, and even more admirers than the good portraits. In any case none of these black Madonna pictures have been more kissed, ogled and adored then Your photograph, which really isn’t black, but sour, and completely fails to mirror your sweet, kissable ‘dolce’ face. But I improve the sun’s rays, that have painted falsely, and find that my eyes, as much as they are decayed by lamplight and tobacco smoke, can still paint, not only in dreams, but also waking. I have you bodily before me and I carry you in my hands and I kiss you from head to foot and I fall before you on my knees and I moan out, “Madame, I love you.” And I love you in fact, more than the Moor of Venice ever loved. False and foul the false and foul world mistakes all characters. Who of my many detractors and snake tongued enemies have charged me with the fact that I am called upon to play a staring lover’s role in a second class theater? And yet it is true. Had those rogues the wit, they would have painted the “relations of production and trade” on one side, and me at your feet on the other. Look to this picture and to that. [in English] – they would have captioned it. But dumb rogues they are, and dumb they remain, in seculum seculorum.

Momentary absence is good, for in the present things look too like in order to be distinguished [ in der Gegenwart sehn sich die Dinge zu gleich, um sie zu unterscheiden.] Even towers appear dwarflike up close, while upclose the small and everyday grow too big. Thus it is with passions. Small habits, that through the nearness through which they adhere to the body, take on passionate forms, disappear, as soon as the immediate presence of the eye is withdrawn. Great passions, which through the nearness of their objects assume the form of small habits, grow and take their natural measure once again through the magical effect of distance.”

To be continued

mene tekel, and other zona news from la la land

2010-03-03T09:12:00.001-08:00

There are two important figures in the News today. One is $3.99. The other is 10.6 million. One is a measure of the America’s deeply broken sense of justice, the other is a measure of the delusive dreamscape in which the political system is fighting its battles.

Here’s what you get in California for pinching a package of shredded cheese, priced at $3.99:

“On Monday, more than a year after a man was arrested outside a market in California with a $3.99 bag of Tillamook shredded cheese in his pants he had not paid for, a judge decided to go relatively easy on him, sentencing him to seven years and eight months in jail.”

It is hard not to laugh when you read in the U.S. Press criticism of the ‘barbarism’ of countries like Iran, where you can be executed for sodomy. They should take a lesson from our radiant and humane justice system!

“Prosecutors in Yolo County, Calif., outside Sacramento, had originally asked for a life sentence under the state’s “three strikes” law, arguing that the man, Robert Preston Ferguson, was a menace to society because of prior burglary convictions.”

What can you say about a country that, on the one hand, cheers on an ex VP who claims to have ordered torture and is proud of it, but fears the menace of a man with a packet of shredded cheese in his undies? It is beyond insult. Insult gets its energy from the absurd – from the man who fucks his mother, from the man who is born from a female dog. Insult is a geek show. But as reality in the U.S. is a geek show as well, insult and reality merge.

As for the second number, here are the appropriate grafs from David Leonardt’s NYT column:

““The strength of data we saw at the end of last year exaggerated the strength of the underlying economy,” Richard Berner of Morgan Stanley, says. “And now we’re seeing some pullback.”

This is especially troubling because the economy is still such a long way from being healthy. Lawrence Katz, the Harvard labor economist, estimates that 10.6 million jobs would need to materialize immediately to return the job market to its condition when the Great Recession began. For it to get there four years from now, the economy would have to add 316,000 jobs a month. That pace would be faster than in any four-year stretch of the 1990s boom.””

Clear your head of any other figures, as this is the predicative one. It tells you what you need to know about housing, income, and the national mood. The crisis was masterfully attacked, to the approval of people such as those who write on the Business page of the NYT, by an elaborate game of hide and seek. This rescued the richest from the results of their years of predation. But the state cannot rescue the richest forever. In point of fact, though the worker may, as Marx says, depend on the capitalist, ultimately the capitalist depends on the system. The system of American capitalism now reflects thirty years of backward motion in which public investment was outrageously stinted, and the grossly dumb theory that free markets allocate capital efficiently was made the mantra for the orgy of peculation that gave itself the name, The Great Moderation. Just as the Great Depression was a reflection of a fundamental shift in the economy – the collapse of the agricultural sector as an employer – so, too, we are suffering from a long term ailment – the collapse of manufacturing as a high wage employer – that can’t be addressed within the fundamentalist parameters of free enterprise. Thus, the unreal struggle of the hollow men of D.C., as Dems and Reps grapple with their mind forged manacles, and the rest of us are left to the mercies of D.A.’s looking for that score.

Although the reader might object that I am downplaying the menace, the terror of the cheese thief:

“According to the Sacramento newspaper, Mr. Ferguson’s defense lawyer, Monica Brushia, argued that his six other burglary convictions had taken place three decades ago and noted that his conviction for misdemeanor assault came when he was a teenager and had thrown a can of soda at one of his siblings. She also noted that the psychologist’s report had concluded that Mr. Ferguson was mentally ill. He has biploar syndrome and struggles to control his impulses to steal during manic phases, she said.
She concluded that his most recent thefts were petty. “We’re talking about a pack of cheese,” she said.
Leaving aside concerns about whether the long sentence was just, some observers in California asked if the cash-strapped state should really be spending between $50,000 and $100,000 a year to lock up a cheese thief.

The last graf reminds me of something I’d been reading, recently. Where was it? Oh, here: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relation with his kind.”

no Ségolène!

2010-03-01T16:36:00.000-08:00

Fortunately, Ségolène Royal’s opinions about philosophy are not, shall we say, pertinent to her job. But at a time when the stuporous Sarkozy and his evident, all embracing ignorance of French literature has at least discredited him with the reading public – why, oh why, does the former leader of the Socialist party intrude herself into this ridiculous affair of Bernard-Henri Levy, as though to even the odds between connais pas and connais pas? Levy is like the philistine American’s idea of what a French intellectual is. His intellectual influence in the world has been, happily, null – even smaller than the contemptible group that sought to plunge France into Bush’s Iraq adventure, people like Andre Glucksman.

That Mitterand, that canny politico, felt that he’d gain some credit and ease some minds by embracing Levy’s revivalist anti-communism in the late seventies was a small price to pay for power (the larger price was supporting the emplacement of cruise missiles, but let us not go there). Royal’s invocation of Mitterand to defend Levy’s factory made philosophy is a gesture that is, indeed, royal – it has the old, perfumed air of the Versailles court, with its favorites and intrigues. There’s no “manhunt” against Levy – in fact, his 128 page ‘philosophy’ work would doubtless sink into obscurity if he hadn’t livened things up by quoting an obvious joke about Kant as a serious analysis. When was the last time Levy read Kant? When he was twenty? It makes me sad for Royal, actually. Couldn’t some friend have taken her aside and asked her not to make herself even more ridiculous than Levy?

Being and Age

2010-02-28T08:48:00.000-08:00

Many philosophers have written about time; few have written about age. Sein und Zeit, and not Sein und Lebensalter. Yet of course time, for human beings, is age.

Alain, who, if he wasn’t a major philosopher, was, at least, an elegant one – rather like Santayana in that sense - did write about age in Les Idées et les ages. He put the thought of age under the symbol of Proteus, with whom Alain, that lover of coasts, identified himself:

‘I have often read in Homer the story of Proteus, as ancient as mankind. And often I’ve repeated it to myself on the barren shore of the sea, led no doubt by that odor of seaweed, and by the rocks that one might say are nestled in the sand like seals. Holding to the story by the things themselves, as one always does, but also attentive, according to a secret rule, to change nothing in that strange episode, as if everything in it were true without fault.”

Now, of course, in holding to Proteus’ story, Alain is miming the gesture of Menelaus in the Odyssey, who held onto Proteus even as the old man of the sea went through every change that could repulse a person. Menelaous wanted the truth from Proteus – he wanted to know the stages of his journey home, his return, his nostos – which is his future – but he could not resist asking about the fates of his companions from the past.

This is a very seafaring sense of age. Alain imagines Proteus making this reply, which mirrors the truth of age – or rather, the truth about the truth revealed to one who ages:

« The truth, » he said, « is not : for everything changes without cease, and even this shore. This sand is made of these rocks, which flow like the water, only more slowly. False every thoght which does not model itself on the thing; but fall absolutely every thought, since what was is already no longer there. You cannot think the true age that you have; that thought, because it is true, is already false. And in the same way, every thought denies and refuses itself, in the image of this moving water which is my being, and which continually denies its own form. »

Thus sang the sea. And Proteus was truthful, in his true and constant shape which is always other, and in deceiving me didn’t deceive me at all, since this time, and by my express request, it is himself who he spoke. »

Running away and nostos – these are the moments that define the adventure of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the broad sense. A woman runs away from home. Her husband and his allies come to get her. They fight, and overthrow the city in which she is living with her fellow run away. And then Menalaus takes her home again.

Significantly, while it is quite clear that Helen runs away, it is much less clear that she returns. Here myth seems to crack under its own weight, and the stories multiply – only Helen’s image returns, being one of them, while her real self remains in Egypt, or on an island in the Black Sea.

While running away and return might well constitute one of the aspects of aging, it is governed, of course, by “home” – which is that impossible merger of geography and intimacy. As impossible as the cogito, as slippery in its production of doubles and monsters, as quicksilver in slipping out of our grasp. It is from home to home that age is reckoned in America – and thus, on the shadow side, running away is also defined. In its very core, running away cannot shake the intimacy from which it seeks to escape into its own privacy – which is the problem that it strains to overcome as, in the shape of the act, intimacy is annulled. Huck Finn lights out, continually, for the territories, because home presses in upon him. And every settler thinks, in a part of his or her mind, that the tie has now been cut, that any house that is built in this land will be laid on the foundations of the death of nostos. We aren't going back. But Alain’s Proteus is right – in the very performance of that act, which still jitters in the American blood, the act becomes untrue.

the indefinitely postponed real

2010-02-18T13:29:00.001-08:00

In the history of the professionalization of philosophy in the Anglo-sphere since the beginning of the Cold War, one notices that there are periodic crises of realism, in which its enemies are warded off in one way or another. In the division of intellectual labor that organizes the universities, the philosophers have taken up the vocation of defending the real. Still, there is the problem of what the real is and how it can be attacked in the first place. On the one hand, there is the inclination to make the real synonymous with what there is – the universe, say. And yet, few realists would say, I think, that the real began with the big bang. If the real is the universe, why not dispense with the term real as a superfluous and confusing lable? Yet one feels that the realists are uncomfortable thinking of the real as having a beginning or end, or having dark matter in it, or black holes. These things are real, but they aren’t in the real. Then there is the tendency to make the real the objective, as opposed to the subjective – thus a black hole is real and a thought is not. But again, this seems an oddly bent way to talk – how could a thought not be real? Is there a domain of irreality? And can I have a ticket to it, please? One way – cause I’m not coming back.

No doubt, the real – reality – is an odd term.

There is an excellent riff on the philosophical use of the real in Engel’s small book on Feuerbach. Engel’s suffers from the self-inflicted wound of never quite being real himself – his commentators will forever compare him to Marx, and take Engel’s writings to be either a translation or a distortion of Marx. This is, however, what Engels wanted. Inevitably, if one member of a dyad is to play the role of the sage, the other must be the fool. If one is the knight, the other is Sancho Panza. If one is Bruno, the other must be Bruno’s ass. And, indeed, Engels is the sensual man compared to the ever harassed Marx. Marx, at one point in his desperate attempt to change the world and not simply understand it, applied for and was refused a humble job as a railroad station accountant; Engels, on the other hand, was apparently a successful manager of a branch of his family’s business in Manchester. It was Engels who turned Marx on to the political economy, not vice versa. It is as if Sancho Panza loaned the romances of chivalry to Don Quixote. Otherwise, Engels seemed to see himself in this dyad.

Engels, who attended lectures at the University of Berlin as a soldier but never took a degree as a student, never imbibed that obsessive stylistic tic of Marx’s that Benjamin (in a different context) calls la culte de la blague. Often, in Marx’s writing, when the reader feels the roof being lifted off the house, we are in the presence of that tremendous, even prophetic sarcasm that makes Marx so pre-eminently a writer, a man of textual strategies. Engels likes a little Hegelian word play as much as the other guy, but when he tells a joke he is sure to label it a joke – not for him Marx’s habit of throwing all his genius into a joke, so that it becomes Satanically, sublimely not funny.

Engels begins his book on Feuerbach by discussing a well known maxim of Hegel’s: all that is real, is rational, and all that is rational, is real. He notes that his has been seen as Hegel’s blessing of Prussian despotism. But Engel’s disagrees. Those who quickly rush to make Hegel a bootlicker of the Prussian court forget that for Hegel, the real is the necessary. It is not “… arbitrary regime measure – Hegel himself adduces a certain ‘tax adjustment’ that counts, without anything further, as real. But what is real shows itself in the last instance also as rational.

But what is necessary, shows itself as rational in the last instance, which, applied to the Prussian state at that time, means, according to the Hegelian proposition, only: this state is rational, that is, corresponds to reason, only in so far as it is necessary; and if it appears terrible to us, and yet, in spite of its badness, continues to exist, the badness of the government finds its justification and explanation in the badness of its subjects [Untertanen]. The Prussian of that time had the government they deserved.
Now, reality – according to Hegel – is not an attribute that a given social or political arrangement retains under all circumstances and times. On the contrary. The Roman republic was real, but so was the Roman empire that crushed it. The French monarchy of 1789 had become so unreal, that is, so robbed of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be destroyed through the great Revolution, that Hegel always spoke of with the highest enthusiasm. Here, the Monarchy was the unreal, the revolution the real. And so it goes that in the course of development, all that was earlier real loses its necessity, its right to existence, its rationality; a new, lively reality steps into the place of the dying real – peacefully, when the old state of affairs is rational enough, without striving to be carried off by death, and violently, when it holds out against this necessity. And so the Hegelian proposition is inverted through Hegelian dialectic into its opposite: everything which is real in the domain of human history will become unreasonable with time, and thus is already according to its pre-determination irrational, is qualified by the irrational from then on; and everything, which is rational in the heads of men, is predetermined, to be real, may it contradict existing reality in ever so many ways. The proposition of the rationality of all the real is dissolved according to the rules of Hegel’s conceptual method into its other; the value of everything that exists is the fact that it dies. [Alles was besteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht]"

I interpret this wonderfully uplifting, almost surrealist credo in terms of the sense of reality. And any newspaper reader of the past ten years must have noticed the loss of this sense of reality in the Americanized part of the world. This loss comes through in two ways: a deep failure of the mechanisms of social cause and effect, and a profusion of symbols that become issues. The three most recent events in which one feels the deep mechanism, the machine, has jumped the track were the invasion of Iraq, the Great Slump, and the earthquake in Haiti, where we witnessed obsessive acts that seemed to respond not to cause and effect on the ground, but to a whole other set of status making motives that failed to recognize or in any way integrate what was happening on the ground. As for the politics of symbols – the Engel’s real certainly generates symbols; the unreal, however, can only deal with symbols. Symbols define the politically possible, which nobody even pretends is a response to or solution for the politically impossible, that is, real social problems. The left and right still debate, for instance, the invasion of Iraq without any sense at all that the invasion had to do with a whole broken structure, going back to the double sanction policy against Iran and Iraq, that had everything to do with navigating the great problem of maintaining a feudal oil supplier, Saudi Arabia, and an irredentist state that is way too small for its irredentism, Israel. Iran is still unrecognized, Osama bin Laden and the magic pygmy pony by which he escaped Tora Bora is still at large, Israel is still irredentist, and D.C. will spend 800 billion plus on war this year with no questions asked. These are the lineaments of dysfunction. They go deep. They sap the real. The earthquake is coming. How long will it tarry?

mystery of the movie actor

2010-02-12T08:28:00.000-08:00

I never know what to say about movies.
My experience of movies has been that the language used about movies doesn’t make sense of that experience.

When Edison, among others, invented the apparatus for making film, everybody – in the West - had a pretty good idea of what an actor did and what theater was. These ideas were passed onto film, as if film were merely the extension of theater. It did not occur to Edison, or to others in the first period of moviemaking, to do more than let the camera record a basically theatrical experience. It was as if one were just taking a big extended photograph of a play.

Now, the play is certainly not a spontaneous experience, but it soon became evident that the theater and the movie operate in different dimensions. The actor in a play may rehearse the part, certainly has to memorize the lines, appears in a stage setting, interacts with others who have also memorized lines, etc. – but all within the defining experience of the performance. The actor’s experience of the play and the audiences is equivalent.

This radically changed with film. It was blown to hell. The idea that the film would mimic the play – photograph it - could not long ignore the technical nature of film making, which allows one to create a performance out of an ensemble of many cuts. And that is key – at that moment, the experience of the audience is fatally and finally cut adrift from the experience of the actor. It is, of course, still possible to film a play, but movies generally are built on the ruin of the old regime, in which the actor experiences the unity of his part in something that occurs from beginning to end at one time. This rarely if ever happens in movies.

Of course, this became, very early, a trope in film. Since the silent films, movies have loved to show – to gleefully demystify – their making. They love to focus the camera on the camera focusing on the actor, they love to show the fakery of it all, they love to show the director, sitting in a director’s chair, saying cut. The cliché quickly and thoroughly penetrated the culture.

However, even as the difference made by the movie was exposed again and again, we retained old, theatrical ways of looking at what was happening. We still called the figures mouthing the lines and pretending to be detectives or kings ‘actors’. And though auteur theory wasn’t really codified until the fifties, the characteristics of it in movie appreciation appeared early on – as though the director was an author.

And so, newpaper and magazine movie critics will write about the performance of the ‘actor’ in the film as something that occurs like the performance of an actor in a play – they will ignore what they know, and what every movie abundantly references – that this is very much a synthesis, rather than a spontaneous unity. The movie references this in its camera work, its transitions, its ‘special effects’, etc., and we know after we have finished it that our experience of it as a performance was an illusion. Even the dimmest movie goer sees through the illusion. The ironic entailment of the reality affect offered by movies is that they become less ‘real’ – they reveal themselves as process the realer they are.

So what are these figures? Are they actors?

There’s a story told on the DVD of Ni Toit ni Loi (Vagabond). In one of the last scenes in the film, Sandrine Bonnaire, the actress who plays Mona – the film’s central figure – wanders into a small French village where the grapes have just been harvested. The village celebrates by allowing a sort of carnival – men dressed up like wine demons capture whoever wanders by – civilians – and dunks them in a vat of wine, or throws grapes at them. According to the interview, when Bonnaire played in this scene, she was not expecting these grape demons – and she was really terrified by them as they chased her around, and eventually into a phone booth. It is an excellent scene – but it would never work in theater. In the unity of the experience of audience and actors that makes up theatrical performance, and actor who doesn’t know what is happening destroys the code of the performance. He or she isn’t better or worse at that point, but becomes a non-actor. However, this rule simply doesn’t apply in film. This is why film actors often speak of acting a role in terms of the way they physically throw themselves into it – rather than, as theater actors do, the way they throw themselves into it psychologically. Bonnaire lets her hair go, doesn’t wash it, or herself – DeNiro pumps himself up to 250 pounds for Raging Bull – etc. Now, it isn’t the case that the film actor doesn’t try to assume psychological characteristics, or the theater actor is not concerned with the body as an instrument – it is a matter of what is subordinate to what. In a sense, the actor in movies, cut off from the entirety of the film by the process of making the film, is doing something very different than what we call acting. A movie is a riposte to methodological individualism – the fundamental level at which the movie works is not reduceable to the separate and individual contributions of the people involved in it. We understand it that way for giving prizes, and because the myth of the individual is something that, at least in America, we pay lip service to. In making movies, the West invented an art form that it did not have the conceptual structure to understand.

Which is why I am uncomfortable with saying things about movies. Because the words I have to use were killed by the camera.

Crossposted from Limited Inc: Freedom and Money

2010-02-10T09:28:00.000-08:00

As every amateur of economics knows (fellow cranks gather round!), money is a mystery that no classical or neo-classical theory has ever solved. Or rather, given the usual fictions of perfect markets with zero transaction costs, there would be no need for money. Thus, the hired, petty visionaries of the capitalist system have devised a model of that system that does not distinguish money from barter – a most embarrassing situation.

Whether Marx did any better is a much disputed question. Keynes, on the other hand, does seem to have grasped the nature of money more fully than others. In the General Theory, he wrote that “the second differentia of money is that it has an elasticity of substitution equal, or nearly equal, to zero; which means that as the exchange value of money rises, there is no tendency to substitute some other factor for it; - except, perhaps, to some trifling extent, where the money-commodity is also used in manufacture or the arts. This follows from the peculiarity of money that is utility is solely derived from its exchange value, to that the two rise and fall pari passu, with the result that as the exchange value of money rises there is no motive or tendency, as in the case of rent-factors, to substitute some other factor for it.”

What this brilliantly points to is that money is the socially materialized form of the principle of substitution itself, and in this way, the money system does compete against the barter system. The latter, of course, is far from a primitive form of the economy – it is, in fact, in millionfold daily use in the U.S.A. Whenever a man says to a woman, I went to see x film with you, now you have to watch x tv show with me; whenever a child says to another child, I gave you half of my M and Ms, now you have to let me play with your game; etc., the barter system is alive and well. It is an adhoc system of socialization, and it is certainly as important as money. The competition between the money system and the barter system also goes on a millionfold daily. At a certain point, one ‘feels’ the threat of the money system to our identifying social acts of barter, which is why such rule of thumb adages about not loaning money to relatives and the like float on our breaths.

But more to my present purpose – the advent of the money system as one in which the substitution principle enters as the unsubstitutable moment was felt to have something alchemical or uncanny about it. This is captured in Faust the second part. And it was also a significant dimension in the discourse about Freedom that became so important in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. On the negative side, there is no substitute – no alternative – to the principle of subsitution. On the positive side, this frees us from the bondage of the various, infinite and intimate forms of the barter system. Simmel, in the Philosophy of Money, makes a crucial distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to”. He uses the example of a schoolboy who, graduating from the gymnasium, steps into the freedom of his college days – a freedom that is “quite empty and almost unbearable” – and so quickly throws himself into other activities, for instance student organizations, that enforce a whole new set of rules of behavior upon him – in contrast to a businessman, who works to receive freedom from a regulation because, once that regulation is dissolved, he can expand his business in a certain way – the “freedom to” is defined by expectations that will concretely materialize upon the moment of ‘liberation”, while the ‘freedom from” is defined by the lack of any clear expectation beyond the point of liberation.

“In brief, every act of liberation shows a specific proportion between the emphasis and extension of the overcome circumstance and that of the one gained.”

Introducing the principle of substitution as the universal rule of the economic sphere does create freedom from, but – as Simmel points out – it also creates a certain alienation. I’ll end this note with this bit from Simmel (who I hate to translate – his language is almost impossibly hooked together in German so as to make translation a drag):

Beginning with the peasant who wins his freedom by the extension of the money system: “Clearly, it was freedom that he gained; but only freedom from something, not freedom to something; evidently, a seeming freedom to all – because it was simply negative – but actually without any directive, with any determined and determining content and thus disposing to that emptiness and lack of restraint, which is produced by every extension without resistance of that accidental, delusive, and seductive impulse – corresponding to the fate of the unfettered person who has given up his gods and thus won “freedom” only to give space for making an idol out of every arbitrary momentary value. It isn’t any different with many businessmen, for whom, burdened with the care and labor of his business, makes it his cherished goal to sell it. When he finally, with the price in his hand, is really ‘free”, there ensues often enough that typical boredom, that sense of the pointlessness of life, that inner disquiet of the rentier, that drives him to the most wonderful, and to inner and outer sense most irrational business ventures, by which he only constructs a substantial content for his freedom. It is just like the bureaucrat, who wants only to reach a stage as quickly as possible where his pension will allow him a “free” life.”

Time and pop music

2010-02-08T09:09:00.001-08:00

“All uncultured peoples sing and act, and what they act they sing, and they sing their treatises. Their songs are the archive of the people, the treasury of their science and religion, their theogony and the cosmogony of their fathers, and the events of their history; the impression of their hearts, the image of their domestic life in joy and sorry, in the bridal bed and the grave. Nature has given them a comfort against the many evils that oppress them, and a substitute for many of the so called blessing we enjoy, that is, free love, laziness, tumult and song.” - Herder.

The country folk cutting furze for the Guy Fawkes bonfires the third chapter of Hardy’s Return of the Native – called the “Custom of the Country” – are presented to us, at first, as anonymous creatures in the falling dark, as they would have been seen by ‘a looker-on posted in the immediate vicinity.’ When the bonfires “sprang into the sky”, the faces of the people around them emerge – although, as Hardy is careful to state, this illumination – good for our supposed on-looker – blinds the people around the bonfire to what is happening in the further darkness outside of it. Having lit the pile, what do they do? An old man begins it:

“With his stick in his hand he began to jig a private minuet, a bunch of copper seals shining and swinging like a pendulum from under his waistcoat: he also began to sing, in the voice of a bee up a flue—“

Naturally, they sing. For a contemporary on-looker, the strange thing revealed in the songs and the following conversation is what is left out: there is no indication that, among the young and the old gathered there, any song is particularly tied to an age group.

Hardy loved his dying festivals of the folk – another one, a dance, is put at the beginning of Tess. However, even if one goes a long way into the darkness around the bonfire on the Rainbarrow, until one meets a more urban local – pop culture as we know it, with its explicit, commercial effort to produce demographics as units of exploitation didn’t exist. Popular culture existed, of course, in abundance – the archive of the folk was being written and rearranged, visual and text culture was definitely colonizing the collective sensorium, but at what we would consider a very primitive level.

Our popworld is quantitatively different. And among the curious effects it has wrought, none is so curious as the way in which age group identification has fused with artifacts that are built to obsolesce. Such as songs. Why people in the Western world, between the age of 13 and 30, identify so ardently with songs, and why those songs then become age and generational markers for them, remains, as far as I can tell, an under-researched question.

I’m thinking about it because of a novel I am reviewing. The novel is basically about a middle aged man – my age, in fact, or thereabouts – who is in a horny sweat about young women. Now, this familiar character type is still good for loads of fun – he is a perpetual Punch, except instead of carrying a stick to beat Judy on the head, he carries a dick to beat himself – figuratively – on the head. All one needs, really, for comedy is a man and a stick – Moliere knew this, as did, well, every farceur going back to Aristophanes.

But the novel pitches uneasily between farce and sentimentality. The character has a penchant for remembering past girlfriends. All of his memories are sound tracked. The sound tracks are the songs of certain groups that came out when he was 13-30. And it is his melancholy observation that these songs are unknown to the youth.

This is an old American trope – or at least as old as the Cold War culture. Curiously, having set your heart on a certain set of songs precisely because they are new – and thus, wear their obsolescence on their very faces – Americans, as they grow older, use the fact that those songs don’t have the same effect on others who are in the 13-30 range, or might not even be known by them, to ‘feel old’.

On one side of this transaction, then, we have the pop culture industry producing goods that are marked explicitly within the continuum of the old-new – a time scheme appropriate to a consumer economy built around obsolescence. On the other side, you have consumers who actually identify, in some way, with these songs. They use them as elements in their own personal soundtrack. And even as they accept them as new, they then continue to drag them around as petrified mementoes of the new. In this way, the middle aged consumer can feel simultaneously new/old, while – in the pop world – a culture that is managed almost exclusively by the middle aged manages to produce zip that one could call, middle aged culture. There is nothing new for the middle aged – it is always the once-new.

This is, actually, an amazingly valuable paradox, and it may be reaching an endpoint. Fortune had a recent story about the amazingly shrinking music industry:

“In 2008, just 35% of album sales came from new releases, the lowest percentage since Nielsen began tracking the data in 1991. Instead of breaking new acts, major labels are increasingly relying on legacy artists and their catalogues.
Case in point: EMI with the Beatles. "EMI is run on catalogues," says Steve Knopper, author of Appetite for Self-Destruction, an account of the record industry's demise. "It prevents them from ever being completely destitute."”

Indeed, apparently EMI has become the house of Beatles, as that fifty year old, long dead band has become their core profit center. The long dead John Lennon, who would have been seventy this year, is going to be pimped out by EMI’s zombiemasters in order to squeeze more pence out of … out of who?

Surely the 50-70 demographic. Nostalgia is the emotional surplus value of the pop product; the “greatest hits,” “collectors edition”, “reunion tour” turns it into profit. The youth culture thus petrifies inside the non-young, as if they never can give up the taste of the yolk they once were on their tongue.

This juxtapositon of the obsolete/new is more, I think, than the temporal scheme manufactured by the pop industry. It is the sign under which America itself, the Cold War country that created the world’s first pop industries, has gone dysfunctional. Under the gun of nuclear war, the Cold War generations experienced the new/obsolete schema when it was, itself, fairly new. It was never really part of the deign that the consumers would take up their pop songs like a cross of age and trudge with it to the grave. But they have done so. The rival time scheme of both the “songs of the folk” and high culture were marginalized – the eternal return, or the eternal now – and in their place we live in the popdome 24/7. It once had energy, it once liquidated all the barbarous hierarchies, but it now sits on our neck, trivializing our every season. The empires of pop manufacture – all those horrible record companies, those multi-media ‘entertainment’ enterprises - are going down, and we are going with them.

News of the vampire squid

2010-02-07T08:08:00.000-08:00

The little gremlins of history have been blindly tap tapping their way down the newspaper tunnel, unrolling bits and pieces of our secret history – a history crowning the decade of peak imbecility, the 00s. In November last year, Bloomberg ran a big story about the negotiations between the U.S. and AIG’s counterparties in December, 2008, which it was revealed that team U.S., headed by Geithner, blithely ignored all advice and forked over 100 percent of AIG’s alleged obligation to, among others, Goldman Sachs. It so happened that the ex GS CEO, Hank Paulson, was the Secretary of Treasury, and it so happened that in September, 2008, when the Treasury and the New York Fed confabbed to try to figure out how to decently socialize AIG’s trillion dollar bets and pretend it was still capitalism, the one bank that was invited to attend the meeting was… Goldman Sachs.

Now, we have known about the 12.9 billion for some time. The story Goldman Sachs crafted in response is a masterpiece of doubletalk, around what seems to be an outright lie.

“Goldman, for its part, has insisted it did not need the bailout money because it was "always fully collateralized and hedged."

Long Wall Street's largest investment bank before it recently became a bank holding company, Goldman answered a series of questions from Reuters about the bailout funds.
"We can say that our notional exposure to AIG is a fraction of what it was at the time of the September bailout," Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally said.
Asked why Goldman Sachs took $12.9 billion of taxpayer money if it was collateralized and hedged on its AIG positions, DuVally said it was because AIG was not allowed to fail, so Goldman did not get money from hedges that would have paid out if the insurer had collapsed. And, he said, under the terms of its contracts with AIG, Goldman was entitled to collateral.
DuVally also said the bank does extensive due diligence on all its counterparties.”

Well, it does take balls – balls made of soap bubble, blood, old bacon grease and curdled milk – to proclaim, with a straight face, that Goldman Sachs does “extensive due diligence’ on all counterparties when answering a question about a counterparty, AIG, whose operations cost the government 180 billion dollars to bail out, just going in. It is like proclaiming that you do extensive due diligence on your friendship while explaining all the pictures of you partying with Jeffrey Dahmer.

Now, however, we know what happened – to a certain extent – between Goldman Sachs and AIG – we know that Goldman Sachs was behind the final tipping over of AIG; the mystery of why Societe General was paid out so much in the AIG bailout is explained; and the GS lie – that it was “fully collateralized”, which has never made any sense, given the nature of the international financial environment in December, 2008 – is exposed for the lie it is just a little bit more:

“In just the year before the A.I.G. bailout, Goldman collected more than $7 billion from A.I.G. And Goldman received billions more after the rescue. Though other banks also benefited, Goldman received more taxpayer money, $12.9 billion, than any other firm.
In addition, according to two people with knowledge of the positions, a portion of the $11 billion in taxpayer money that went to Société Générale, a French bank that traded with A.I.G., was subsequently transferred to Goldman under a deal the two banks had struck.
Goldman stood to gain from the housing market’s implosion because in late 2006, the firm had begun to make huge trades that would pay off if the mortgage market soured. The further mortgage securities’ prices fell, the greater were Goldman’s profits.
In its dispute with A.I.G., Goldman invariably argued that the securities in dispute were worth less than A.I.G. estimated — and in many cases, less than the prices at which other dealers valued the securities.
The pricing dispute, and Goldman’s bets that the housing market would decline, has left some questioning whether Goldman had other reasons for lowballing the value of the securities that A.I.G. had insured, said Bill Brown, a law professor at Duke University who is a former employee of both Goldman and A.I.G.
The dispute between the two companies, he said, “was the tip of the iceberg of this whole crisis.”

To sum up – amazingly, the Treasury invited Goldman Sachs to its preliminary meetings with A.I.G. in September, and Goldman Sachs used its privileged knowledge to pump even more money out of A.I.G., which then has to be propped up for the not insiginificant sum of 180 billion in December, of which some large part goes directly to Goldman Sachs, and some part goes to Goldman circuitously, through Societe Generale.

We know the Bush/Obama people who did this. And these are the people who have designed our entire response to the depression.

They are backed up, of course, by the collective intellectual firepower of those people who designed the occupation of Iraq, who populate the Pentagon. It is no longer a question of whether the elite is stupid, mad, vicious, corrupt, and gorged with the theft of natural resources that are even now being taken out of the mouths of infants worldwide and stuffed up the asshole of GS shareholder – it is a question of the disconnect, the democratic shortfall, that allows this clique to operate with impunity.
Another zona story.

and the architects of our disaster are reappointed in time to do it again!

2010-02-04T12:21:00.001-08:00

The headlines over the last few days have come out of history’s back pocket – or Nemesis’s. What could be more symbolic, after the senate votes to re-appoint one of the main architects of the disaster, Ben Bernanke, than the fraying of his patch and glue rescue work? The problem facing the elite in 2008 was much like the problem that faced the foreign policy elite in 2002: a numbers problem. In 2002, it became evident that the U.S. was never going to be willing to field enough soldiers in Iraq to truly occupy the country. Thus, no matter if you agreed with the invasion or thought it was simply dirty and immoral – I chose the latter position – the chances that it would be a success were stunningly low. This truth was uttered by one of the unlikely messangers of Nemesis, General Shinseki, who was no genius, but simply the accountant of death and destruction – a military specialty – toting up sums. However, when it turned out that the second coming of Hitler rolled over like a rotten mush mellon, the venues of conventional wisdom were triumphant – the naysayers of our great liberation were proven o so wrong! Well, a fiasco eight years later, of course, the naysayers can count up the dead, the wounded, the money and the exiles and well ask: was this much effort worth putting in place the coven of warlords that presently rule Iraq? The answer of course is no. And the answer comes with a codicil: the opportunity space – let’s call it – for pursuing the fall of Saddam Hussein was never opened up in the run up to the war. Nobody talked of recognizing Iran, or supplying Northern Iraq, that happy little autonomous place with the smuggler lords on top of it, with money to make the place bloom a little.

The opportunity space that opened up in October, 2008 with the fall of Lehman was similarly about the systematic cause of the failure of Reagonism. You’d have to be an economist not to see it: the rising level of exploitation, as the Marxist would say, or the stagnating median income and rising long term unemployment killed the flip this golden goose economy.

And the numbers were, similarly, all about inequality and its cost, in the end. When the wealthy can get wealthy by piling up trillions of dollars of securitized instruments and playing the ontological spread between the nominal and the real, they will do it. Unsurprisingly, there goes the capital that is supposedly being ‘efficiently’ allotted to those enterprises that actually, like, produce a good or service. The Patchwork kids then went on their tangent. And they produced a great illusion – which, they were happy to see, bore fruit in the stock runup of 2009.

That illusion may be coming apart. Just as the first few weeks after the Iraq invasion it was all, Mission Accomplished, so, too, it has been with the refusal to address the deep systematic problems with the way the economy has been restructured in the Reagan era. Viz that inequality. So, recently, the NYT posted a thumbsucker about the astonishing fact that 10 percent of American homeowners own houses that are significantly underwater, and when today the news slips out that the Mediterranean countries are either going to have to be bailed out by the EU or we are all gonna die, we can get a better look at those Fed-TARP patches. Apparently need patches. Someday, we will look back on the 17th century search for the philosopher’s stone as a model of lucidity compared to the refusal of the elite to understand the situation we are in.

So, here’s a kicky coupla grafs from the jinglemail article:

New research suggests that when a home’s value falls below 75 percent of the amount owed on the mortgage, the owner starts to think hard about walking away, even if he or she has the money to keep paying.
In a situation without precedent in the modern era, millions of Americans are in this bleak position. Whether, or how, to help them is one of the biggest questions the Obama administration confronts as it seeks a housing policy that would contribute to the economic recovery.
“We haven’t yet found a way of dealing with this that would, we think, be practical on a large scale,” the assistantTreasury secretary for financial stability, Herbert M. Allison Jr., said in a recent briefing.
The number of Americans who owed more than their homes were worth was virtually nil when the real estate collapse began in mid-2006, but by the third quarter of 2009, an estimated 4.5 million homeowners had reached the critical threshold, with their home’s value dropping below 75 percent of the mortgage balance.
They are stretched, aggrieved and restless. With figures released last week showing that the real estate market was stalling again, their numbers are now projected to climb to a peak of 5.1 million by June — about 10 percent of all Americans with mortgages

What Earthquakes Shatter

2010-01-31T07:56:00.000-08:00

The story in the NYT starts: “The fact that Haiti was mired in dysfunction well before the earthquake, despite having received more than $5 billion in aid over about two decades…”

It is hard to get past a start that presents an act of astonishing callousness as an act of astonishing generosity. The poorest nation in the hemisphere, which was invaded by the U.S. three times over the past hundred years, received almost a gigantic 250 million per year – this is supposed to make us shake in our boots at the magnanimity of it all. The Timesmen obviously expect the Haitians to say of our astonishing generosity what the Psalmist says of the Lord, “Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness” – but those greedy Haitians were not satisfied and still remained poor! How can such things be.

For comparison sake, look at that gigantic amount going down the maw of Haiti with, say, cost overruns for the last decade at the Pentagon. These came in at a minimal – really, these guys are taking a haircut – a pequena, tiny tiny cost of – it is really amazing – cost of – how the Pentagon just has to squeeze these things in, run a tight ship – cost of 300 billion dollars in cost overruns. Which would mean that the ratio of cost overrun for obsolete weapons systems over the past ten years is at a ratio of about 100:1 over the foreign aid to Haiti. Or, to put it in simpler terms, every package of screws, bolts and ringers bought by the Pentagon is at the cost of one Haitian life. Oh, the price is so right! Or perhaps we could look at the cost of foreign aid to Israel since 1997, which comes to 103 billion dollars.

Now, that would be a showstopping article: “The fact that Israel was mired in dysfunction well before the siege of the Gaza Strip, despite having received more than $103 billion in aid over about 12 years…”

However, don’t hold your breath for that article to come out.

I’ve been thinking, lately, about demonic voices. I wrote about this in a post last September:

“We all know how to recognize demons. The demonic voice has one overriding characteristic: he will always use the logic of the system against its structure. Thus, when a voice demands that women play their traditional role in the home, while manipulating the economy so that the median household, just in order to stay still, must throw into the pot 350 more working hours per year – which is the difference between the median household of 1970 and the median household of today – you know you have caught a demon.”

Marx, that witch, had a thing to say about the demonic voice in the economic-philosophical manuscripts. He related what I cal the demonic element in our discourse to what he called alienation.

Don’t I obey the laws of economics when I gain money from the surrender, the sale of my body to a stranger’s lust (the factory workers in France name the prostitution of their wives and daughters the 10th hour of work, which is literally true), or am I not acting in the properly national economic way by selling my neighbor to the Morrocans (and the unmediated commerce in human beings as the trade in conscripts, etc. is found in all the ‘cultured’ lands), the economist will answer me: you aren’t transgressing my laws; but see what Mother Morality and Mother Religion say; my economic morality and religion has nothing to reproach you for, but, - but whom should I now believe, economics or morality? The morality of economics is gain, labor and savings, sobriety – but economics promises to satisfy my needs. The morality of the economy is wealth with a good conscience, virtue, etc., but how can I be virtuous when I cannot be, how can I have a good conscience when I know nothing? This is grounded in the the essence of alienation, that every sphere lays other and opposed yardsticks upon me, one for morality, one for the economy, because each is a particular alienation of humankind and each fixes a particular circle of alienated essential activity, each creates alienated relations to other alienations.”

We are ground, then, as human being between these circles. If you want to see how human beings can be ground finely like wheat into flour, read the newspaper, or listen to the tv news. That’s how it is done. An earthquake, a truly apocalyptic earthquake like that which has destroyed Port au Prince, destroys, as well, for the moment, the schizophrenia that allows us to get by, that has shaped us to get by with those circles in our head and in our circumstances.

its delicious - made from offal and rat turds! all for you.

2010-01-28T17:09:00.000-08:00

I have no liking for Bruce Bartlett, Reaganite and former WSJ editorial writer, but he wrinkled out the meaning of the Oregon vote:

Yesterday, the citizens of Oregon ratified a large tax increase on corporations and the wealthy. The top personal income tax rate will rise by two percentage points and the minimum tax on corporations will also rise, including a new tax even on those with no profits to report, according to a Wall Street Journalreport. According to Tax Foundation data, this would make the top rate in Oregon 13 percent

This vote is considered a bellwether because the state has previously beensupportive of tax limitation measures. Also, it appears that populist anger, which has previously been channeled toward the anti-tax tea party movement, may have the potential to swing in the other direction when people are faced with cuts in programs with wide support.

I can easily see many tea party goers becoming rabid tax-the-rich folks if the alternative is higher taxes on them. Let us not forget that just about a year ago many of the House of Representatives' most conservative members voted to impose a 90 percent tax rate on bank bonuses. As I noted at the time, those supporting this confiscatory tax measure included Eric Canter, Peter Hoekstra and Paul Ryan.
I have foreseen this development for some years and feared that once our budgetary problems forced action that sharply higher tax rates on the rich, corporations and capital in general would be the inevitable consequence. “

Unfortunately, there has been a dominant liberal discourse about why “Kansas is Republican” – why the people who theoretically benefit most from government outlays vote for the GOP – which posits that this is the primitive instinct of people who are stupidly afraid of losing their guns. Actually, this notion of the general barbarity of the populace has broad and deep roots in progressive history, which is why, at the turn of the century one hundred ten years ago, most progressive reform was about taking power away from the corrupt and giving it to the managers. In other words, you can’t trust the people.

There might well be reasons not to trust the people, but this is not because they are barbarous and don’t know how to make a simple calculation. The calculation is that you get more of an advantage in every way if you vote for tax cutters who will never really have the power or desire to cut government programs that benefit you. On the one side, you protect your guns, get lower taxes, and get your agricultural supports and your Big Pharma pills – and on the other side, you get ruled by people who think your culture and guns are shit and may not raise your taxes, but you never know – plus you get about the same level of government support. Score GOP!

When you consider the people in the sticks to be too stupid to define their own self interest – which the what’s a matter with Kansas crowd always defines in terms of money, as if the East Coast liberal would give up his culture in a heartbeat if you offered him a hundred more bucks – they understandably vote against you.

But the money is running out. It is still running out. We have been told that Ben Bernanke ‘saved us’ from the Great Depression. What that means is: by performing a prodigious slight of hand, the Fed has, for the moment, produced the illusion that the banks are solvent. It is a delusion that has resulted in big payouts to bank officials and announcement of a bumper year. But, as the guy at Rortybomb argues, because the banks aren’t writing down their massive losses doesn’t mean the masses losses disappear – rather, the game now seems to be simple predation, with the support of the government. The mortgage modification program, if it works, is a disaster, and if it doesn’t, is a disaster. The money, I have long thought, should be yanked, all of it, and a small business loan agency created from it to inject money into the system in real time in a sector that employs people right away. Those small businesses that currently owe at 10 percent could pay off with money they borrow at 2 percent – which would be a big gain – and thus regain a certain limberness, which they simply can’t afford to have at present. Since one of the most hard hit sectors among the unemployed are the 18-28 year olds, and since small businesses disproportionately employ them, this would be a win for the party that does this.

It would be a loss for the banks, however, and they would put the keebosh on it. I only float this balloon as a sort of test of the terrain, a demonstration of the no future that is our present policy.

Felix Salmon has a nice overview of Rortybomb’s point, and makes one of his own:

“Konczal also looks long and hard at the banks’ refusal to write down the principal on their loans, despite the fact that if you modify a loan so that it remains seriously underwater, you’re pretty much guaranteeing an extremely high redefault rate. After all, negative equity is pretty much the best single predictor of delinquency.

Why are the banks behaving like this? I think the obvious answer is the right one: they’re holding these loans on their books at much more than they’re really worth, and they can’t afford to take the write-downs which would accompany principal reductions of roughly the same magnitude as the decline in housing prices. This kind of head-in-the-sand behavior can only possibly work if housing prices suddenly rebound in the next couple of years, and that ain’t gonna happen.

Both the Bush and the Obama administrations tried to put together programs to deal with the banks’ toxic residential real-estate assets: the original TARP was one, the PPIP was another. Neither went anywhere, and as a result the problem is just as bad now as it’s always been. Remember that, when you look at the enormous 2009 bank bonuses, and ask yourself whether any of them will be clawed back if it turns out that last year’s profits were dwarfed by the write-downs that banks should have taken and didn’t.”

It is a puzzle how a potential 4 trillion dollar shortfall in December 2008 became all righty when fed about half of that amount by March, 2009. If these admittedly drive by analyses are right, then the smoke and mirrors act just gave us an intermission.

All of which means that the political establishment is working in such a disconnect from the political reality in the hinterlands that there are going to be changes of one kind or another. Both parties, I think, are going to tacitly converge on a solution: America’s medium income is going to have to slide down. This was the grand pact of the Reagan era, but at that time, the idea was that credit could take up the slack and the country would grow enough to carry that credit burden. I think the new grand pact will be that the country can’t really afford such a, well, extravagant middle class. What, after all, do those householders do? Whereas important people, people at the top, work hard – they play hard, but they get their rewards because they are the smartest and the best. But they are getting tired of trickling down to such losers.

If this is the new Dem-GOP pact, we’ll go into the second phase of the Reagan era. The problem will be getting the doggies to eat the dogfood, as always. I think that the political elite on both sides is sorta convinced of the stupid red state thesis – it would make sense to them, and, in their onesided understanding of the world, it would never occur to them that freeriding can be a calculated decision. Thus, there may be a lot of fluidity between the teabaggers and a left of the Oregon type. Bartlett, to his horror, might turn out to be right.

Elitism and one dimensional woman

2010-01-25T17:47:00.000-08:00

I’ve been happy to see Nina Power’s book strike some blood, since this was what she was aiming at. Nothing is worse than missing the artery if you are trying to plunge in a needle. I’m a little less happy that the contretemps immediately got shunted onto a sideline about the issue of elitism, with Jessica Valenti attacking Power for elitism, and Power striking back to deny being tainted with that most monstrous vice.

I think it is symptomatic that as the distribution of wealth in the U.S. and the U.K. has become so monumentally unequal that it would make the slaves of Ancient Egypt gape, “elitism” has become a more common term of abuse. The same people who weep over the very idea that a man or woman who brings home the bacon to the tune of 300 million per year should have to fork over an extra 3 percent of that to the government (it is an oppression like unto throwing our successful entrepreneur into a concentration camp!) are also always ready to denounce elites. But who are these elites? Those who usually have enough cultural power to denounce a society that is so servile as to bow down before entrenched economic, gender and racial power.

Now, though I find the Power-Valenti argument off track, in one sense the question of elitism goes to the heart of Power’s attack on consumerism, which is that it offers false power, based on the reinforcement of a deeply passive attitude towards our present political, economic and cultural arrangements.

Feminism comes from many sources. One of those sources, in which Valenti operates, is accommodating to consumer society – with its affection for positive thinking. This affection has a long history in the U.S., going back, as Ann Douglas showed in Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the twenties, to the convergence of various reform movements – including women’s suffrage – and the advocates of New Thought back in the nineteenth century. Power, on the other hand, comes from another strand of feminism, which mounts a fierce attack on patriarchy as the very template of consumer capitalism. This strand has an affection for the power of the negative. Now, the latter group are and have always been in minority – and in as much as elites are, quantitatively speaking, minorities, it is easy to elide the difference, which is a difference in social power. When the term elite is detached from its relationship to power, and is simply used to paint any minority critique of the social (which must necessarily forge its own vocabulary or be enslaved by the dominant concepts of the time), we are looking at a familiar ideological routine. You don’t have to be Adorno to notice that the simplest credit card form is more ‘elitist’ in using deliberately chosen esoteric concepts to mask entrenched power than the collected works of Alain Badiou – yet the credit card form, as well as all the esoteric, everyday documents by which the middle and working class signs away its freedom, gets a free pass.

I’m reminded of the way Tom Friedman – that paragon of neo-lib pundits – uses the word democratization – as in sentences like, ‘401ks have led to a democratization of the stock market.’ What is meant is the opposite of democracy – that is, a process by which concentrated private power is augmented against the rights of the average person. No doubt, to this mindset, the forced contribution of labor by the serfs ‘democratized’ the wealth of the nobility.

In the same way, Power, by criticizing the abandonment of the attack on patriarchy, becomes an elitist. The deep contempt for the theoretical base of feminism precedes its abandonment as a radical political practice.

And so the story would end – except that it doesn’t. Valenti is right to point out that she hasn’t abandoned political practice. She actually does quite a lot of it. Myself, I’d say that Valenti is working broadly in a liberal – not neo-liberal – vein, under the aegis of ‘softening of manners” and using the state to create reforms. It is the core of the liberal hope, going back to the Scottish enlightenment. It is one thing to take up rape as an exemplary instance of patriarchal power, and another to help find the funding for counseling rape victims and work on making police departments conscious of their very often horrifying behavior vis a vis same. In 1994, when Hilary Clinton went to a feminist conference in Beijing and sounded off, one could say – I’d probably say – that this was hot air. But in fact this had a very powerful affect on third world feminist movements. In Mexico, for instance, it is after that conference that the state was forced to start taking domestic violence crimes seriously, and changed the laws – not enough, not so much that domestic violence is still taken out of the context of ‘reconciling’ husband and wife, but enough that there are now shelters, there are now laws, there are now organizations, etc. Thanks to people like Valenti, this happens.

Valenti’s hope is, I think, that there is a lot more play in the institutions of the liberal order, the order that emerged in the Cold War, to satisfy the need for gender justice. Power’s book poses two questions. One is, how much has the compromise with these institutions cost? The second question is, how much real play is left?

The quarrel arises out of Valenti’s use of ‘accessory’ to describe feminism. That’s a telling metaphor, since the manufacture of accessories, shoes, purses, clothing, have been moved out of unionized first world factories and into maquilladora in the less developed countries. The structures in the first world have adapted – but was this a ruse, a shuffle of the sites of oppression in which the game seems to change, but the same group always wins?

A writer's story - January 13, 2010

2010-01-25T09:44:00.000-08:00

There’s a very good site that provides a pretty complete list of Haitian/Caribbean authors one should know about called ile en ile.

Hopscotching through certain of their links, I came up a story – an earthquake story – that will surely become part of the legend of what happened on January 13, 2010. One of the most famous contemporary Haitian writers is Dany Laferrièere, author of Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer. And one of the most famous contemporary publishers and critics of Haitian literature, who lives in Montreal, is Rodney Saint-Élo. Both writers were in Port-au-Prince for the Etonnants Voyageurs writers conference. Both were staying at the Hotel Karibe. And they were actually having dinner together when the earthquake happened. They’ve left two separate accounts of the dinner on the web. Laferriere’s is here and Rodney Saint-Eloi’s is here. Laferriere has a sharp eye out for what my Mom, if she were alive, would probably be calling God looking out for him – by which she meant the insignificant incidences that guide one past a disaster. God is in the blindspot. The writer, especially the comic writer, suspects that God is not alone in the blindspot, and that one can’t presume on what he is thinking as he sits enthroned there. In any case, Laferriere attributes his salvation to a mango and a lobster. On the day of the earthquake, Laferriere was setting himself up in his hotel room. He’d ordered a lobster. And he was concerned to find some mangos:

We patiently waited for the writers in the great lobby of the Karibé Hotel. Some were working under the trees. One could very well eat : the cooking is excellent. A lobster (in fact, it was a langouste) that I didn’t get last time because, even if it is succulent, it is sometimes difficult to digest – especially late at night. But I love it, thus I waited for the moment to peacefully dine on the lobster-langouste. But I did what I always do every time I arrive in a city : I looked around to find out if there were any mangos and avocados. I put them in my room. The mangos perfume the room. A tropical odor. It is not yet the season for mangos, but I found some being sold on the street. A little saleswoman squatting on the sidewalk, her back to the wall. A dress folded between her thighs. The white scarf. Oh how I love the tender, animated gaze of the women of this town ! Maette Chantrell bought me the fruits : five mangos and two avocados. And I didn’t even offer him a mango. How silly, I lose my head when I see mangos.

Fruits and veggies. The feast of my childhood. I love to come back at night, turn on the tele, or place a book on my nighttable – and devour an entire avocado with bread.”

And so Laferrière comes into the restaurant to have his lobster-langouste.

I chose my lobster and he [Rodney Sainte-Eloi] a poisson gros sel. They bring us a salad and bread. Too hungry, I began to eat. Rodney sees Thomas Spear [a U.S. professor of literature] drinking a beer alone in the courtyard. He invites him to join us. We chat. I ask the waiters to speed it up, because we hardly have ten minutes, as, at 5 o’clock, they are going to come for us. We elbowed the waiters a little. Because they love me, they poked the cooks…

There was a noise that came from behind my back. Terrible. As though we were being machine gunned. I turned around. Nothing. Suddenly, I saw the cooks speed past. I told myself something must have exploded in the kitchen. It took 6 to 8 seconds to understand that this was an earthquake. We ran, Rodney and me. Thomas remained to finish his beer, he said. We returned to find him. We lay down on our stomachs in the courtyard, under the trees, besides Isabella and Agathe [members of the Etonnants Voyageurs]. In diving to the ground, Rodney scratched his knee.
Suddenly, a second shockwave. I began to be afraid, for I had the impression that this was not going to stop – not before our death. I waited for the earth to open. Someone said we ought to leave the courtyard where there were too many trees and seek shelter on the tennis courts. We went. A small shockwave.
Faces were waxy. We didn’t know where we were. A cloud of dust rose above the city. Not a cry. Total silence. Total silence. »

Lyonel Trouillot again

2010-01-23T17:38:00.001-08:00

I was a little sick yesterday, and I am burdened down with work. Sorry, then, for failing in my mission to translate some messages from Haiti. Again, today, this is Lyonel Trouillot, writing yesterday.

Port au Prince, the contrast of scenes and smells.

Tour of the city this morning on a motocycle taxi. With Jimmy, who is playing the role of private chauffeur. We found the gas in a station. Not too much of a fight. I expected more. As yesterday, when the neighborhood watched established by the young people distributed drinking water (not a lot, what they could find) to family representatives. Have I let myself be influenced by the people talking about looting and violence? Some injuries, some attempts to jump in line. No more. Certainly, there are city districts where things are a bit more complicated, but man is not devouring his neighbor to carry off anything he can.

In the districts at the base of town, scenes contrast with smells. Women wash down their stoops, sweep street corners. The large fallen chunks. A dedication to cleanliness, here. An odor of death, there. There are cadavers under the great crumbled buildings. I cross paths with people I know who have lost their near ones. We don’t speak of the dead. Interview with some French journalists. They admit that they haven’t seen the scenes of violence that everybody predicted. There is order to put in the discourses. There is also a will to begin again to live or rather to begin individual life and to begin a collective life. Some people speak of a library. Others of meeting responsible scholars. Others of starting benevolent associations of qualified professionals to inspect the buildings, to see which can be demolished, which can be used. I hear some people talking about agricultural products which should be encouraged and augmenting the production of them, nourishing and easy to produce.

Thinking of everything at the same time.

On the radio, too, I hear more and more pertinent and coherent talk. Some hours after the earthquake on 12 January and in the days that followed, we heard the silence of the state and sometimes disquieting and hallucinatory plans: abandoning the direction of the country to a scientific committee composed of great mystics (!), the sea which was going to wash over the totality of the land. … There begins to be more serious talk. One should not forget that 2010 is an election year, that the legislative voting should take place in some weeks, the presidential in some months. To find rational solutions. One of the major stakes here is not to let the earthquake put a brake on the democratic process. At the end of the Preval mandate, to put in place a provisional government if the elections can’t take place soon, that is a proposition that seems to have some echoes. The problem is that we have to think of everything all at the same time. One hears as well the spokesmen of the Haitian and American governments ‘clarify” that it is not a question of an occupation. This means that they have heard the muttering and understand that the majority of Haitians do not wish that the aid comes at the price of their political rights.

Return to the streets. Le Champ de Mars empties and fills. Yesterday, the trucks transported the refugees in the direction of the old ranch of Jean-Claude Duvalier (yes, he had a ranch, every man to his own little Texas). Their places have been taken. If the numerous streets seem empty, the shelters set up on the wastelands, in the clubs that dispose of a lot of land, are not filled. This city was as full as an egg, and even if people go south or north, there remains a lot of people.

The state, we always return to it.

Noon. New shocks. The flower pot near the computer shook without asking for my permission. We’ll never see an end to this. On the radio, they interview a psychologist about the sensation of constant disequilibrium, of vertigo, that many that people claim to feel. Its psychological, says the psychologist. Thanks for the information, Mr. specialist. But we need some information on the part of the state and the technicians to tell us and reassure us in indicating what attitude we should have concerning these aftershocks. Be it absent or present, it always comes down to the state.

Today, a new distribution of water in the neighborhood. This time, it was found by the pastor. I don’t support that man. Not because of his beliefs. But because of the noise of his preaching and his voice, which has a false sing song. But he brought water. And with the members of the watch, we discuss the future. We need to install things that don’t exist. Among other things, a small library. Need to include in the charter a clause on the sound limit for the radios. But we will have plenty of time to discuss this.

have you heard? there was an earthquake...

2010-01-21T17:24:00.000-08:00

Obviously, I write. To aid Haiti, I’ve sent money to the red cross – and hope to send more. But I write. So why not translate some of the material I am coming across in French, I said to myself.

There is a fantastic site, Balawou, that has been publishing reportage and comment since the beginning. http://balawou.blogspot.com/ Sometimes I get the feeling that for the Americans and the English, the earthquake in Haiti was the equivalent of one hundred thousand house flies being crushed – not the kind of news that should interrupt one’s day, or be allowed to cross one’s blog, especially if you have made an important Deleuzian analysis of Lady Gaga. I however am such an old fashioned humanist that I feel all pinched in my human parts at the hundred thousand crushed houseflies. I'm even questioning the “leftist” credentials of the important Deleuzian analysis of Lady Gaga. I must be going senile.

Anyway: Lyonel Trouillot, who if there had not been an end of the world would have had a pleasant time at the Etonnant Voyageurs writing festival in Port au Prince, scheduled for 1/14/2010 – has been warding off the insanity by posting reports. Here’s one.

"Haiti, living with Death by Lyonel Trouillot.

Port-au-Prince, Wednesday 19 January, 9 am In certain quarters, the capital is like a deserted city. Few cars, few pedestrians. Ruins. And some bold spirits who try to fossick out some objects, some souvenirs, from under the fallen debris.
Really, we no longer are looking for the living. On the ruins of the house of my friend, Georgia Nicola, coordinator of the l'Atelier Jeudi Soir, we assess, with an engineer and some workers, the scope of the disaster. What is a great disaster except the sum of a thousand small disasters! Each small disaster is in itself immense. Lives, careers. Seven days after the catastrophe, the ‘after’ begins.

I ask a laborer for news about Josué, the handy man of the quarter (guard, coiffeur...). He’s dead, he is somewhere under the ruins, some houses further down. A glance towards the ruins of the said houses. Exit Josué. A young Doberman has joined us. He seems to have chosen us as his adoptive parents. His master’s house is no doubt destroyed. The day before, our friend Valerie’s family buried her, a long time member of the atelier who directed a theater school. This occurred in another quarter, at the foot of the city. A building blocked the street, like an immense projectile, in order to strike like a whip a school, a church, and a library.

You can’t weep for so many dead at the same time. It becomes almost ridiculous. In the pile, you can’t choose. I met my friend Danice, an artist for the magazine Le Matin. He lost his wife and his two children. The editor of the magazine isn’t staying there. His wife and his three children, who came from the U.S. to spend the holidays with him, are among the victims. This fucking earthquake has not left a single soul without his allotment of deaths.

Vigilance, but also extortions.

No one without his quota of deaths, that is one of the truth at the beginning of the after. I go down to radio Kiskeya, which has begun to function since the day before yesterday. I go for news. The distribution of aid is still posing problems caused by lack of coordination. The last [?] tentatives and hopes of the rescuers to take out the last [?] survivors of the debris. The small robberies of crooks who infiltrate the ruins in the night to take a computer, a gadget or cash from out under the ruins. The reactions of the police who are acting in some parts of town, putting up surveillance, often without any nuance. Vigilance, but also extorions. Where did you find that? While you are waiting, they arrest you, you can explain it later.

Some rapes. Some cases of looting. Carrefour, Pétion-Ville, le boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines... One thing is certain, neither the police nor the population will spare the bandits. In a number of quarters, the youth have formed neighborhood watches. The security of the zone is one of the priorities. Not evil, those who take the ones who steal. People need shelter, drinking water, food. They have neither the time nor inclination to play at democracy with the thieves, rapists and murderers.

Many questions. Question about the intention of the ones and the other givers of aid. About the U.S. in particular, which now controls the airport and announces the dispatch of troops, of new troops. The government is slowly shaking off its dumbness, but it isn’t yet sufficient nor sufficiently clear to reassure, really. I return. Port-au-Prince seems to have been emptied. Those who remain sleep in the streets. Some, because their houses have been destroyed; others, because they don’t want to enter theirs. I understand. I have developed a foul fear of showers and bathrooms. Among the rumors, the rich (there is still some in this breakdown) have reservd private airplanes. For them as well, without doubt differently, the question comes up, how to live after death?"

Haitians will rescue Haiti

2010-01-20T07:45:00.000-08:00

Haitian history is shaped by racism and genocide. That history is sometimes difficult to tell, because it exists athwart a history we think we know, in which the forces of revolution are automatically identified with the history of the struggle against racism. But in the revolutions in the New World, this was not so – one of the British strategies against the Americans was to promise the slaves freedom. It was a cynical strategy, God knows, but it certainly complicates the epic idea of the American Revolution. And, as Benedict Anderson pointed out in Imagined Communities, the Spanish Court employed the same tactics:

“The Liberator Bolivar himself once opined that a Negro revolt was ‘a thousand times worse than a Spanish invasion.’ … It is instructive that one reason why Madrid made a successful come-back in Venezuala from 1814-1816 and held remote Quito until 1820 was that she won the support of slaves in the former and Indians in the latter, in the struggle against the insurgent creoles.”

Bolivar did change his mind – because Haiti gave him refuge. And so it was that Haiti sailed into the nineteenth century as a successful slave revolt state just as the forces of republicanism and a new form of racism – one that broke with the 18th century Enlightenment – began their long negotiation, their baleful synergy.

To get out ourselves from under these earthquakes took all of the last century.

It is, and must be, the work of intellectuals of good faith to remind us of these facts.
Yet these facts shouldn’t lead us to a dream of anger that is really an escape from present reality. And by present reality, I mean what is happening today, what happened yesterday, in Haiti – I mean the rescue effort that, as ought to be clear, reflects this past in its organizational soul. Sow when I read this story in the NYT, I wonder not about the racism of the twentieth century or the shock doctrine of tomorrow, but about the blindness of today, this hour, this minute.

“LÉOGÂNE, Haiti — The Marine helicopters began landing just before noon on Tuesday in a cow pasture here in this heavily damaged farming town about nine miles south of Port-au-Prince, kicking up strong winds and drawing crowds of the curious and hopeful.

About 125 Marines eventually landed here and planned to stay about 24 hours to unload initial shipments of water and food. They expected to spend the night camped out in the pasture.

…
The Marines passed the food they brought to the United Nations, which sent it by truck to a nearby stadium to be distributed. Corporal Sajous and other company translators filtered into the crowd to explain where the aid was going. But the message wasn’t getting out to everyone.
“Yes, they are going to give it to us,” said Son Son Maurice, 25, as he stood waiting. Asked if he was sure, he said “Yes, I am sure.”
The Marines did not leave the cow pasture on Tuesday, and what they witnessed of the damage in the area they saw from the sky as their helicopters flew in.”
Notice, again, again, notice until your eyes are bloody that this rescue treats the rescued merely as a bureaucratic problem in placement. Shall we distribute our stuff to them in X spot, or tell them to go to the stadium? Never is it a question of asking the people of Léogâne themselves to help in the distribution, to use their own wits and their own skills to set up diverse centers of rescue – to humanize those who have been shown, by the world’s plates, that it is laughable to speak of humans ‘dominating’ the world. Works of love have to be done by way of a leap of faith – that in fact human beings can love. These works of love, however, are done with such a lack of faith – such a suspicion that somewhere, someone will steal something – and such a curious unawareness that actually, the cognitive hierarchy in this situation between those who know and those who don’t puts the rescued over the rescuers – that the casualties, emotional and physical, will go up in this rescue.
I was heartened to see that certain rescuers do know this. The group lead by Paul Farmer, Partners in Health, has made it part of their mission in Haiti to use Haitians as rescuers. Farmer supposedly is close to Bill Clinton, and Clinton, frankly, is the man upon whom, at the moment, Haiti’s future really rests – depending on how vociferous he is, how much noise he makes, Haiti will swim or drown - although it has drowned and come back to life before. Drowning is how Haiti has survived.
Use your influence, Mr. Farmer.

The New Jerusalem and the old Adam: a haitian collage

2010-01-19T07:32:00.000-08:00

"And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

10:26 He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?"

"I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King."

"And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?"

"MIAMI — America has a message for the millions of Haitians left homeless and destitute by last week’s earthquake: Do not try to come to the United States.

Every day, a United States Air Force cargo plane specially equipped with radio transmitters flies for five hours over the devastated country, broadcasting news and a recorded message from Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington.

“Listen, don’t rush on boats to leave the country,” Mr. Joseph says in Creole, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon. “If you do that, we’ll all have even worse problems. Because, I’ll be honest with you: If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.”

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

10:31 And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

10:32 And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side."

"But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people."

10:33 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,

10:34 And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

"Department of Homeland Security officials have also transferred 200 illegal immigrants from the Krome Service Processing Center here — a federal jail for people awaiting deportation — to make room for a possible influx of Haitian migrants.

The State Department has also been denying many seriously injured people in Port-au-Prince visas to be transferred to Miami for surgery and treatment, said Dr. William O’Neill, the dean of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, which has erected a field hospital near the airport there.

“It’s beyond insane,” Dr. O’Neill said Saturday, having just returned to Miami from Haiti. “It’s bureaucracy at its worse.”

Customs officials have allowed a total of 23 Haitians into the United States on humanitarian grounds for medical treatment, said a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security."

10:35 And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

10:36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?

10:37 And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

The Looting Lie

2010-01-17T08:04:00.000-08:00

What to say?

Read this:

"A deux ruines d'ici, une équipe de sauveteurs français -venus de Nice, de Lyon et de Guyane- ausculte en vain une dalle de béton. Sous cette toiture, devenue pierre tombale, une voix de femme s'est tue. Un peu plus haut, quelques rescapés ont pris place sous un arbre. Il y là Fritzner, un agent des douanes qui a perdu aussi son épouse. Jusqu'à mercredi, Miranda répondait aux appels ; depuis, plus rien. A ses côtés, le frère cadet de Philippe. Lui garde sous sa chaise un fusil à pompe, l'arme de service de l'aîné. « Dans l'état où il est, confie-t-il, ça vaut mieux comme ça. »"

Two ruins from here, a team of french rescuers from Nice, Lyon and Guyana vainly pound on a block of cement. Under this roof, become a fallen stone, a woman's voice has fallen silent. A little higher, some escapees have take up a place under a tree. There is Fritzner, a customs agent who has also lost his spouse. Up to thursday, Miranda responded to calls; since then, nothing. At his side, the little brother of Phillipe. He keeps a pump action shotgun under his chair, the service arm of his brother. 'In the state we are in, he confides, it is better like this."

Read this.

Kathleen Tierney: Social scientists began studying disasters in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A lot of this research was sponsored by the military and defense establishment, and the kinds of things they wanted to know about were related to nuclear war. They wanted to know how people would behave if Russia dropped the bomb on us—would they panic; would they engage in criminal behavior; would they engage in antisocial behavior; would they be able to pick themselves up and rebuild society? So, from the very beginning, researchers put a lot of emphasis on crime, deviance, looting—that sort of behavior—because that’s what their funders cared about. And there was a lot of field work done in disasters, where researchers go out in disaster areas and take a look at what’s happening. And what did the early research discover? If you go back to the 1950s and you look at some of those writings, a lot of it’s aboutdisaster myths—what people say happens in disasters versus what really happens. What these researchers discovered was that the media—even way back in the 1950s and 1960s—approached huge disasters with certain frames. When the media reports on disasters, they’re inevitably going to focus on the dramatic and antisocial, even if it’s one percent of the population committing these acts. And even back then, the looting myth always came to the fore of media reports.">Kathleen Tierney: Social scientists began studying disasters in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A lot of this research was sponsored by the military and defense establishment, and the kinds of things they wanted to know about were related to nuclear war. They wanted to know how people would behave if Russia dropped the bomb on us—would they panic; would they engage in criminal behavior; would they engage in antisocial behavior; would they be able to pick themselves up and rebuild society? So, from the very beginning, researchers put a lot of emphasis on crime, deviance, looting—that sort of behavior—because that’s what their funders cared about. And there was a lot of field work done in disasters, where researchers go out in disaster areas and take a look at what’s happening.

And what did the early research discover?

If you go back to the 1950s and you look at some of those writings, a lot of it’s aboutdisaster myths—what people say happens in disasters versus what really happens. What these researchers discovered was that the media—even way back in the 1950s and 1960s—approached huge disasters with certain frames. When the media reports on disasters, they’re inevitably going to focus on the dramatic and antisocial, even if it’s one percent of the population committing these acts. And even back then, the looting myth always came to the fore of media reports.

I am screaming

2010-01-16T10:00:00.001-08:00

How many people have died in the last four days – 1,000? 10,000? Because of the lack of a rope. Or a crowbar. Or a wheelbarrow. Or a tent. Or water? What we are seeing played out in Haiti is the malign side of the action movie ideology. In this ideology, the people are ‘victims’, they are ‘helpless’, the must be ‘rescued’. This is the ideology that has created the astonishing spectacle of the U.S., the richest nation in the world, represented by the Southern Command, basically scratching its head for three days about how to get “into” Haiti.

The rescuers are already there. They are called Haitians. The inability to see them for what they are – helping hands, fonts of information and ingenuity, centers of rescue – is killing them.

Yes, Haiti, the poorest place in the Western hemisphere, will need an influx of doctors and nurses. But the labor to be done, the caring to be extended, the information about the places – down to addresses of houses in Delmas – is already there. Why is it not being used? Partly because emergency response structures simply have not taken into account the new world of communication – the internet. But mostly because a mindset, on both the left and right, insists on seeing the Haitians as victims, not rescuers. Normally, this is the kind of thesis that should go into an academic paper. But the letter now killeth. We observe, with sinking hearts, the cloud of witnesses whose witness is in vain. This is a typical message on facebook: “Olivier Dupoux is distributing drinking water to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti with 35 trucks he urgently needs DIESEL fuel !! Bring diesel to factory Rte #1Cazeau, corner of tabbar 34 01 11 12”. Did anybody hear it? We know in Jacmal, Claudy Lavaud Jules, who runs a hotel-restaurant that is still standing, has taken in a number of refugees. Has anybody contacted her? Jacmal, from all reports, has a working airport. Nothing is landing there. Why?

In crisis, all the old shit bubbles to the surface. We saw this in New Orleans. Well, there are geological strata of shit involving Sainte Domingue/Haiti that go back over the centuries of mass murder. Fine. I don’t expect this to change in the blink of an eye. But it is obvious, it is a fire crying in the sun obvious, that the refusal to take the people being ‘rescued’ seriously is murdering them.

In my tiny flyspeck of a life, I will not pretend this is not going on. I am screaming.

mangle of inequality actually sighted again! Excitement builds.

2010-01-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks like economists are finally discovered what I - or my blog, Limited Inc - revealed two years ago: the housing bubble was derived from the real driver of our current collapse, increasing income and wealth inequality. What I have labelled the mangle of inequality, for it is a three sided mechanism.

Apparently, according to Alyssa Katz, this is the line of argument of University of Chicago economist, Raghuram Rajan's "upcoming book Fault Lines: “the initial causes of the breakdown were stagnant wages and rising inequality." Also see Rortybomb among my links. My first version of the mangle of inequality is here.

Here's a newsfromthezona post from February, for your dining and dancing pleasure:

Monday, February 16, 2009
I'm psyched to see that Paul Krugman is on the cusp, the very cusp, of LI's Mangle of Inequality thesis.

So I'll just quote the meat of the post here:

"The place to start, of course, is the seventies. Suddenly, after thirty years, we are starting to recognize the shift that began to occur then. Let me remind you – the shift consisted of 1., the crushing of the bargaining power of labor; 2., the de-manufacturing of America – which was partly connected to the fact that manufacturing workers were the most militant, and partly the inevitable effect of the ability of capital to find other, cheaper regions in which to place factories; and 3, the dissolving of traditional constraints on credit.

These events occurred in response to the most serious crisis in capitalism since 1945. Galbraith’s New Industrial state, the liberal Keynesian economy, had created structures that were supposed to resolve such crises. These included the management of aggregate demand by the state, the moderation of labors’ older, utopian demands for a slice of the power in return for a steadily rising paycheck, and management’s movement away from optimizing profits in exchange for lessened volatility. The Keynesian moment unwound for a number of reasons – labour, with increasingly less interest in the political dimension that originally animated unions, became much more vulnerable; the government management of aggregate demand, combined with the government dependence on War, had finally unleashed inflation; and the ROI of the Fortune 500 corporations was finally causing an investor revolt. However, of the three factors I am listing in the shift to the new, Reagonomic paradigm, one and three seem oddly disjoint. How is it possible to diminish the bargaining power of labor – which results in the stagnation of wages – and at the same time dissolve traditional constraints on consumer and other credit?

Of course, from the neo-classical point of view, that makes a lot of sense. Instead of the government actively managing aggregate demand, the private sector, with a freer credit market, can take over. And in fact, even if wages stagnate, household incomes rise. The house itself as an asset appreciates, for one thing; more investment vehicles are made available to the public, for another thing; and finally, there is the great entry of women into the labor market.

Credit, then, is the keystone. It is from this moment on that the financial services sector, which had been relatively unimportant in the Keynesian regime, returns in force. It is what I would call the mangle of inequality – playing on Andrew Pickering’s term, mangle of practice. Contemporary capitalism in America has to effect a straddle – the economy depends on consumption, and yet, the majority of the consumers engross less and less of the productivity gains accrued by the system. Freeing the financial markets had two effects – one was to re-vamp the consumer’s financial horizon. Instead of worrying about making a wage sufficient to live the good life, the consumer worries about making a wage sufficient to have a good credit history – which is the magical key to the world of cars, plasma screen tvs, houses, and all the rest. The other was to make the consumer a shareholder in the system. For simplicity’s sake, call this the 401k world – that stands at the symbolic center of a system by which the ordinary person was hooked into the market. And the market could, consequently, use vast flows of capital to keep easing credit. A virtuous feedback, so to speak.

It had another, symbolically resonant significance. The triumph of the state in the 20th century was in providing for retirement. The state successfully created, within a capitalist economy, a mass ability to finish one’s life without poverty or utter family dependence. It was the template for the structural goods that the state, in a mixed economy, could provide – when the demands of distributive justice could not be aligned with the price creating market in a good or service. Consequently, social security has earned a special hatred from the right. The American system of encouraging private investment was meant, on the surface, to complement social security, but the ultimate aim was always to replace it.

The mangle of inequality, then, was not – as in Marx’s time – a head to head confrontation between classes. It is a more complex machine, in which class interests are blent so that head to head confrontation is systematically differed. The political triumph of the system is that the blending disenfranchised populism, since it became unclear who would really benefit from populist practice."

Honest economists should be shocked by the Fed report, since it goes counter to the mainstream notion of the convergence between expanding the power of the private sphere and wealth for all - every man a king (of his own home equity loan).

Disaster and Us

2010-01-13T19:30:00.000-08:00

For those of us who can’t take our eyes off the videos from Haiti, there is something uncanny in the fact that people are walking about without issuing deafening screams, even as they pass by collapsed buildings and corpse after corpse.

There is a long tradition that in disasters, the natural devastation is followed by human savagery - lootings, shootings. Read from this perspective, we know to expect the worst when we start reading Kleist’s short story, Earthquake in Chile. In that story, an earthquake in St. Jago, Chile occurs just before Josephe, a nun, is about to be beheaded for sacrilege. Her crime was that she conceived a child and gave birth to a son, the father of whom was Jeronimo, her former tutor.

In the confusion of the earthquake, the execution doesn't happen. The archibishop dies. The guards flee. Josephe, goes back to her convent, finds her boy, and then searches for her lover, Jeronimo, who has miraculously survived the collapse of his prison. As the next day dawns, the couple find themselves in the midst of refugees who are busy helping each other. They welcome Josephe, Jeronimo and the baby. Then one of them says that at the only church that had been spared, a mass was going to be said, and all agreed to go there. Josephe and Jeronimo at this point are thinking that they will beg for mercy from the viceroy and surely be spared, along with their child. In the church, the canon preaches a sermon that builds to a crescendo of blame, in which the earthquake figures as a punishment for the sinfulness of St. Jago, like the devastation wrought upon Sodom and Gommora. In the exaltation and rage of the crowd, Josephe is recognized and surrounded, and so is a man who is taken for the father – until Jeronimo cries that he is the father. Then he, Jeronimo, and Josephe are surrounded and clubbed to death.

A careless reading of this story would be that man is beast to man. Kleist, in reaction to the French Revolution, is warning us against mob violence. A more careful reading would distinguish between the crowd of refugees with whom Jeronimo and Josephe mingle and the crowd in the church. The difference is, in the church, the structure of organized power – the power that had run St. Jago – asserts itself again.

Rebecca Solint’s last book was about this very topic – the strange discrepancy between the government and media portrayal of disasters – as crises that require eminent force – and the reality of the testimony of disasters.

“We should not be surprised, then, that what transpires in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is nothing like the popular version. People rarely panic or stampede, nor do they often immediately engage in looting or other acts of opportunism. The Scottish-born mathematician Eric Temple Bell, who witnessed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, saw “no running around the streets, or shrieking, or anything of that sort” but instead people who “walked calmly from place to place, and watched the fire with almost indifference, and then with jokes, that were not forced either, but wholly spontaneous.” Another survivor, San Francisco editor Charles B. Sedgwick, noted-perhaps somewhat hyperbolically-that “even the selfish, the sordid and the greedy became transformed that day-and, indeed, throughout that trying period-and true humanity reigned.” This phenomenon of “surprising” human kindness and good sense is replicated time and again.”

Solint’s Harper essay was published just before Katrina hit. Of the reasons I have to curse and forget the 00s, Katrina is as important as Iraq – in that it revealed what I believed, intellectually, but not in my heart. Intellectually, I’ve always known that the poor – which would include myself – are shit in the U.S. But in my heart, I have never really thought that. Watching the film, shown over and over again, of the guys on Claiborne taking out a drug store (that, in the eighties, was my drug store, when I lived in that neighborhood), I could only absolutely identify with them.

I had come South, from New Haven, in 1998 with the intent to live in New Orleans again – that was my original plan, and I merely fucked up by marooning myself in Austin. In 1995, if I had gone through with my original plan, I might well be one of the corpses of Katrina. No transportation out, a minimal amount of money, no place to stay and no person to take me in – of such are the victims made. That's me. It tore something in me to see the condemnation pour in upon the 'black hoodlums" as the country let NOLA sink into the water.

A more heartbreaking image than that of the bushwacking of an empty drug store came from Michael Lewis’ Wading Towards Home, perhaps one of his best essays. Lewis came from one of the aristocratic families, the ones whose relics amaze the tourists riding the streetcar down St. Charles. Back in the 80s, I lived for a while in the Audubon neighborhood, in a mansion that you can see, if you care to look, in a shot in the movie Cat People. Lewis’ family lived in Uptown, and Lewis discovered – and probably was not too surprised by the fact – that most of Uptown was dry when he drove into New Orleans three days after the supposed blockade. Everybody knows Uptown is higher than the rest of the City. And this is the info Lewis came in with:

”Beyond Uptown, here is what I knew, or thought I knew: Orleans Parish prison had been seized by the inmates, who also controlled the armory. Prisoners in their orange uniforms had been spotted outside, roaming around the tilapia ponds - there's a fish farm next to the prison - and whatever that meant, it sounded ominous: I mean, if they were getting into the tilapias, who knew what else they might do? Gangs of young black men were raging through the Garden District, moving toward my parents' house, shooting white people. Armed young black men, on Wednesday, had taken over Uptown Children's Hospital, just six blocks away, and shot patients and doctors. Others had stolen a forklift and carted out the entire contents of a Rite Aid and then removed the whole front of an Ace Hardware store farther uptown, on Oak Street. Most shocking of all, because of its incongruity, was the news that looters had broken into Perlis, the Uptown New Orleans clothing store, and picked the place clean of alligator belts, polo shirts with little crawfish on them and tuxedos most often rented by white kids for debutante parties and the Squires' Ball.”

What he found, of course, was that this was all wrong. Not only all wrong, but pathetically wrong. I still cry reading this paragraph:

“The old houses were also safe. There wasn't a house in the Garden District, or Uptown, that could not have been easily entered; there wasn't a house in either area that didn't have food and water to keep a family of five alive for a week; and there was hardly a house in either place that had been violated in any way. And the grocery stores! I spent some time inside a Whole Foods choosing from the selection of PowerBars. The door was open, the shelves groaned with untouched bottles of water and food. Downtown, 25,000 people spent the previous four days without food and water when a few miles away - and it's a lovely stroll - entire grocery stores, doors ajar, were untouched. From the moment the crisis downtown began, there had been a clear path, requiring maybe an hour's walk, to food, water and shelter. And no one, not a single person, it seemed, took it.”

This is Solnit, about what is revealed by disaster:

“The days after 9/11 constituted a tremendous national opening, as if a door had been unlocked. The aftermath of disaster is often peculiarly hopeful, and in the rupture of the ordinary, real change often emerges. But this means that disaster threatens not only bodies, buildings, and property but also the status quo. Disaster recovery is not just a rescue of the needy but also a scramble for power and legitimacy, one that the status quo usually-but not always-wins. The Bush Administration's response after 9/11 was a desperate and extreme version of this race to extinguish too vital a civil society and reestablish the authority that claims it alone can do what civil society has just done-and, alas, an extremely successful one. For the administration, the crisis wasn't primarily one of death and destruction but one of power. The door had been opened and an anxious administration hastened to slam it shut.
You can see the grounds for that anxiety in the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which was the beginning of the end for the one-party rule of the PRI over Mexico. The earthquake, measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale, hit Mexico City early on the morning of September 19 and devastated the central city, the symbolic heart of the nation. An aftershock nearly as large hit the next evening. About ten thousand people died, and as many as a quarter of a million became homeless.
The initial response made it clear that the government cared a lot more about the material city of buildings and wealth than the social city of human beings. In one notorious case, local sweatshop owners paid the police to salvage equipment from their destroyed factories. No effort was made to search for survivors or retrieve the corpses of the night-shift seamstresses. It was as though the earthquake had ripped away a veil concealing the corruption and callousness of the government. International rescue teams were rebuffed, aid money was spent on other programs, supplies were stolen by the police and army, and, in the end, a huge population of the displaced poor was obliged to go on living in tents for many years.”

We will see which narrative prevails in Haiti. Look, though, for signs of the better angels of our nature.

HAITI

2010-01-13T08:34:00.000-08:00

There's only one thing to say about today's news: give to the haitian relief fund of your choice, please.

Notes on the gnostic historian

2010-01-11T07:22:00.001-08:00

There is a certain kind of skepticism that nests like an ominous crow in the branches of cultural relativism. It is aimed at all the myths and motifs that are used in the hegemonic strata of Western intellectual life – or, taking the nuts and bolts out of my mouth, by orthodoxy, by everything that cultural relativism, since Herder, has sought to take down – Western superiority, a narrow sense of reason, a vulgar notion of progress, all of it. Thus, in the sixties and seventies, when cultural relativism was particularly strong, there were a number of claims that such diverse social phenomena as the practice of cannibalism or the Mafia or European witchcraft were myths. They didn’t exist. There are powerful reasons to take this point of view, as almost always, the existence of the phenomena in question legitimate various forms of repression by established power.

Those reasons, for those who lived in the twentieth century, fell out of the sky, and sent the trains to the barbed wire camps, all as ‘defensive measures’ against an all powerful, and as we know, mythical enemy. Given this disastrous history, given these non-existent enemy others who were glued to the bodies of millions and incinerated in the furnaces, certain historians – notably Norman Cohn, whose The Pursuit of the Millenium is one of the great books in my life – looked back and traced the pattern of fake conspiracies and fictitious entities in Western life back to the Roman era. In a sense, this was a sort of anti-gnostic history.

The insight here is that the powers that be create magic narratives of danger and threat, that they have magic mirrors on the wall, behind which they operate the switches and buttons, also goes back a long way – back to Machiavelli at least, or perhaps to Gyges. In King Lear, the disabused, perfect Machiavellian, Edmund, a bastard and thus by birth an outlaw, confects, out of little hints, Edgar’s plan to take his father Gloucester’s life. His lucidity – which dissolves all traditional bonds (such as the difference between legitimacy and bastardy) and superstitions, such as the connection of the earth to the stars, is the background against which we see him commit his treacheries with the comic glee of one of Shakespeare’s minor hitmen, those spawn of fairground puppet devils:

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My
father compounded with my mother under the
dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
major; so that it follows, I am rough and
lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar--
Enter EDGAR
And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old
comedy: my cue is villanous melancholy, with a
sigh like Tom o' Bedlam. “

This view of power as manipulated by an absolutely skeptical consciousness that has, as a preliminary to its move, dissolved all pacts with the stars, all differences of birth, has leveled the world to its bare bones and yet – the inexplicable last undissolved illusion – wants to rule over those bones is itself the kind of thing that should prompt our skepticism. Granting that moral panics can be generated in much the way that a movie director can generate a windy scene – using machines that the camera never films – we imagine that those who claim that these fictitious conspiracies and organizations – the Jew, the Witch, the Trotskyite – exist, and work their subterranean evil everywhere, are totally aware of the off-camera machinery. Surely the potter knows his pots. This view, however, is mystifying in its own way. We can find real equivalents for the theatrical cynicism of an Edmund in our history – we can cull statements from Goebbels, Stalin, Mussolini, etc, and take them as sudden illuminations of the arcana imperii – but in doing so, we mirror the tendency we are fighting against, we endow our creatures with a consciousness that has no unconscious, that is impervious to its own mythmaking, that is all machine and no ghost.

I find this interesting because I have come to think of the book I’m writing, the Human Limit, as a Gnostic history. But looking up the current literature on Gnostics, I find a strong current in the scholarship that want to brush the very concept out of our history like a dusty cobweb. Karen King, in What is Gnosticism, my guide to the current scholarship, comes dangerously close to this position. It is understandable in some ways. When you read the exegetes, busy dissolving the texts, it is a wonder and an astonishment. Some postulate a complexity to the making of the texts at Nag Hammadi that would make a a particle physicist proud. Often, the assumptions seem a little, well, non-empirical. I’ve read some of the scholarship about the Gospel of Thomas which takes the fact that it contains ‘doublets”, or passages that repeat each other, as proof that it must have been compiled by many writers. Obviously, these scholars should ask an editor – such as moi – since it is rare that I edit a lengthy manuscript that doesn’t contain doublets.

King does one very good thing, and attempts to disentangle gnosticism from heresy. As the Gnostics were mainly known from the denunciation of them by various hepped up church fathers, it is hard not to think of them through that lens – a lens that seems all their writings as motivated by reaction to orthodoxy. In fact, when we go back early enough, there is no reason to think that orthodoxy is a very good description for what is going on in the spread of the Jesus cult – and its taking into itself other floating notions about salvation – changing one’s life – in the Eastern Mediterranean.

So, what did the Gnostics think, anyhow? One persistent motif has to do with a certain dualism vis-à-vis creation. The world, in this framework, was created by a lesser god, the child of Sophia. Not necessarily an evil one – but certainly lesser, and certainly not all knowing. He doesn’t quite know what he is doing. Lovely Eve discovers this when the helpful serpent suggests eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which was not a sin – but the first revelation. This gives us the Gnostic historian’s equipment – a suspicion about the framework of matter or appearance, the notion that the fundamental elements are the hidden and the plain, the secret and the truth, sides – in other words, the jagged sense that the world isn’t finished and the glorious delusion that what will finish the world is one’s history of it. The demiurge, for the cool Gnostic, is authority in all its helplessness – weaving violence out of its vulnerability. The Gnostic historian proceeds with a film noir sense of the world, in which the femme fatale is actually Sophia’s embodiment here on earth.

Stevan Davies, in an article about the Gospel of Thomas (1983), made a case for it as a fifth gospel. It is a striking text, in that it takes the important thing about Jesus to be what he said. This way of understanding Jesus has, of course, been displaced – it seems to us that there is no contradiction between the Church being a defender of the family and the son of God that this church worships, even though Jesus is much more scathingly anti-family than, say, Rimbaud – there is no giving and receiving of wives and husbands in the Kingdom, and “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple.” This contempt for the family exhibited in Jesus’ every recorded gesture is simply not considered important. It was, however, before the cult erased the person, and the Gospel of Thomas, while lacking any real sense that the important thing about Jesus was that he was resurrected, is full of the sense that the new life begins by breaking utterly with the old rules.

How to think about these things?

“Thomas preserves at least two parables which almost certainly come from Jesus but which exist in a kind of pre-church purity. They allow one, in all likelihood, to hear Jesus without the whispers of centuries encouraging particular interpretations. Here is 97:

Jesus said, the Kingdom of the [Father] is like a woman who was carrying a jar which was full of meal. While she was walking on a distant road, the handle of the jar broke, the meal spilled out behind her onto the road. She did not know; she was not aware of the accident. After she came to her house, she put the jar down; she found it empty.”

The jar – which she didn’t notice – the crumbs in the road – the empty container. The Gnostic historian is like that woman whose things have slowly trickled away from her, every step she takes, leaving a trail behind her for the birds of the air to eat – all of this without her knowing it. Lose everything.

some thoughts about creepiness

2010-01-09T11:17:00.001-08:00

I had lunch with my friend M. the other day, who mentioned Hermann Asperger’s original essay on Autistic children. M. was trying to get a copy of this essay, translated by Uda Frith into English, and frustrated that he couldn’t find one – and not at all willing to fork over the 70 bucks needed to buy the book it is within.

I looked it up on Google books, which reveals considerable parts of it – especially the case study of Helmutt, the Ur-Asperger’s child. Asperger described Hellmut as being oddly unaffected by exterior stimulus, and, in contrast, driven by interior stimulae. Thus, he’d suddenly bash someone for no reason, or he would suddenly throw things around in the classroom. Moreover, his gaze was turned inward.

Asperger gave the six year old boy some tests – naturlich – to discover his level of intelligence. One of the tests was to ask about the similarities and differences of different things. I simply can’t express how much I loved Helmutt’s response to the ‘item’, wood and glass: ‘because the glass is more glassy and the wood is more woody”.

Shades of Shklovsky! And the famous formalist motto, to make the stone more stony!

Asperger’s has become a fashionable syndrome, as we all know. I don’t want to suggest that Mann’s Adrian Leverkuehn is an Asperger’s case - but I do want to suggest that there is a certain autistic strain in German lit, which comes out as a mastery of the “creepy.” In Adrian’s case, this one side of his character - his creepiness, his isolation – is what the narrator so wants to protect, and so exposes in his ‘biography.’ Adrian suffers from his one, his only sexual encounter with a woman – who, with a typically autistic single mindedness, was the one woman in the one brothel he went to – sent there as a practical joke by a taxi driver – who touches him on the shoulder. He smell her perfume. That is it – he flees the brother without ever having sex with any of the girls – but eventually, after a year, returns to find the girl who had touched his shoulder. She has left, gone to another town, and Adrian tracks her down. There she tells him that she has a venereal disease, but he has sex with her anyway. His first and last. His first and last syphilitic infection, too. Before the cure for syphilis, there were multitudinous ‘cures’, all false. And by grace of the mysteries of the immune system, one could either live with a low grade infection, or the disease could attack decades later – paralysis, madness, death. Baudelaire, who caught syphilis in his twenties, finally figured out that the doctors hadn’t cured him – figured out he was maudit in actual and gross physical fact – by his late thirties. He knew where he was headed.

To get back to the creepiness – in Adrian’s nearly unsullied virginity, he – or is it the disease? – becomes obsessed with the Little Mermaid. Der kleine Seejungfrau – provides a bizarrely appropriate motif of horror which contrasts, in the writing of the book, with the time of the writing – that is, the time of the destruction of German cities through the bombing campaign, and the destruction of Europe through the Nazis.

Adrian dreams not only of the little mermaid – who exchanges her bottom part, that fish tail – that androgyny – for human bottom parts, with which she could walk in the world outside of the ocean – but only at a price. Every step brings excrutiating pain, as though red hot needles are being driven into her bare feet.

Of course, as is well know, Mann was extremely bi-sexual. The narrator, Zeitblom expresses his homoerotic feelings for Adrian by wishing to ‘unfuck’ him – that negation of the fuck that, as any of us dimestore Freudians can tell you, is the equivalent of fucking in the unconscious. Adrian knows this too, on some level – hence his choice of Zeitblom to confess, in a letter, his accidental visit to the brothel. The mermaid’s loss of a tail and her possession of a human lower part is a movement from the realm of the unfucked, the embryotic, to the realm of the fucked, perchased with pain at every step. That pain is hobbling, and slows walk to a creep – the creep of the creepy.

Can a whole culture fall into a state of autism? Can its collective dreams converge on the image of the mermaid, losing her tail and walking, with infinite pain, into a barbed wire camp?

Humanism, degree zero.

2010-01-06T19:52:00.000-08:00

In Vladislav Zubok’s Zhivago’s children, a study of the post-Stalinist intelligentsia, there is a fascinating passage about the effect of Stalin’s purges: “Other university level institutions of higher-learning were re-created in the 1930s as workshops for educated Soviet elites. Yet those elites – the Bolshevik vanguard… - perished in the dungeons of the secret police, in the camps of the gulag, and in mass graves on execution fields. That great bloodletting deprived the revolutionary and Soviet past of its heros and replaced them all with the towering effigy of the Great Leader, Stalin…Most of the survivors of the terror at universities and other cultural institutions were, paradoxically, the professors who did not share the communist idealism. They, who had instead been brought up in the nineteenth century tradition of liberalism and humanism, could not help passing onto their students their manners, habits, ethical standards and aesthetic standards – while keeping their political views to themselves.”

I find this utterly fascinating. I am not, in my old age, afflicted with cancred roots, Spanish moss, or a gauzy picture of humanism. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about Thomas Mann lately. In 1919, he writes his Reflections of a Non-political man, and – in effect – seems to align himself with the conservative revolution. He’d broken with his brother over the war, which he celebrated, and was receiving strokes from people like Spengler. In 1922, he gives his speech on Tolstoi and Goethe, and ends on an odd note in which Tolstoi is associated with the Asiatic, and Goethe is the spirit of Deutschland – which means “refinement, ennoblement and the humanization of the natural – not rational-radical de-naturalisation. It will not be Asiatic and wild, but European, which means gifted with a sense for division, order, measure, and bourgeois in the oldest, most worthy, medieval-german sense…” And, Mann mentions, as well, the “youth” – the youth that had, for instance, murdered Rosa Luxemberg, although he doesn’t mention that: ‘Western humanistic liberalism, politically speak, democracy, has some ground with us, but not all the ground. It is not the worst part of Germany’s youth who, before the decision, Rome or Moscow, opt for Moscow. At the same time these youth err not to say that not Rome, and not Moscow has the answer, but: Germany.”

However, as Mann scholars point out, from the time in which Mann’s essay is published in the Neue Rundschau to the time in which Mann expanded and redacted it as a much longer essay, the emphasis, the tone, the nuance – and Mann is a master of nuance, he lives for his nuances, his sentences are as full of feints as a good pitcher is full of curve balls and changes of pace, what he lives for is the insight that dazzles slowly, ever so slowly – had changed. Terence Reed in Thomas Mann, the uses of tradition, tracks some of the changes in the essay, and in particular this one:

“It is not the moment for Germany to conduct itself anti-humanistically, to take Tolstoi’s pedagogical Bolshevism as a model… On the contrary it is the moment to emphasize our great humane traditions emphatically and proudly, not only for their own sake, but also to visibly show that the claims of “latin civilization’ are unjustified.”

The story is that Mann finally understood the flow of the conservative revolution – understood that he had walked too far out, so to speak, into that ocean. And he could feel that the currents were steadily sucking away at all the aesthetic principles he held dear – as well as destroying the bourgeois – or really, buergerlich - attitude that he had defended so fiercely in the Reflections.

And the current goes out, and the current goes out. To think of the artists, the poets, the filmmakers who had answered the call in the twenties in the Soviet Union – who had, as it were, stepped on the throat of their own song, not that they knew it. Mann, long afterwards, in Hollywood, at the end of the war in which, as he was well aware, the country he was living in had bombed into rubbish the entire history of the buergerliche culture – presents a scene in Doctor Faustus in which Adrian Leverkuehn is uncharacteristically philosophical. He has just seen the performance of his Gesta, and in the after performance excitement, explaining why this work was not so… austere, intellectual, unintelligible to the masses, he says: “Funny, isn’t if, how for a long time music saw itself as a means of redemption, and all the while, like all art, it needed redemption, that is, it needed to be redeemed from a solemn isolation that was the fruit of culture’s emancipation, of the elevation of culture to an ersatz religion – needed to be redeemed from being left alone with a cultured elite, known as the ‘audience’, which will soon no longer exist, which already no longer exists, so that art will soon be all alone, alone to fade away and die, unless, that is, it should find a way to the volk, or to put it un-romantically, to human beings?”

A cry from the heart – except that Adrian’s biographer is not at all pleased by this surrender, this fear of art’s solitude, this retreat to the ‘volk’, to ‘human beings’. It is here that the curious dialectic of humanism as Mann saw it takes a turn – a much more radical turn than that of, say, Heidegger, who for all his anti-humanism had decided, with disastrous – or, in Heidegger’s case, farcical effect – to find a way to the volk.

And that moment – well, I savor that moment in Mann. That humanist contempt for the ‘human being’ as presented by a popularist anti-humanism – that ability to embrace, if necessary, any solitude. That icy, icy clasp, those fingers around my heart.

sound as an acid flashback

2010-01-03T09:43:00.000-08:00

When I was a lad, I stockpiled a bunch of songs in my memory. I didn’t consciously do this – I didn’t plan on doing this – but here I am, some thirty five years later, with a head full of Dylan, Beatles, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen songs.

I don’t really listen that much to these singers anymore. Every year, I find myself listening to different singers, and I take a very satirical view of people who go to see the ‘return tour’ of their favorite rock n roll singers, since I think the spectacle of a sixty year old singing a song he made famous at twenty four, when he was full of jism and cockiness, in front of a crowd of homeowners with their hands in the air like they just don’t care, is funny. Although, in truth, the singers I liked best back then have written songs that register their age, just like the great blues singers did. Before they died, I saw both Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, who were certainly and bluntly old. Age is an opportunity for the great songwriter or poet, to state the obvious. But the crowd of handwavers want to re-live the hits – as the radio incessantly intones. O well - in my own decay I descry the decay of the whole frame of the world. But I do sing the songs I learned when I was a kid. When I am on my bike, or when I am putzing around my apartment, I sing these songs. When I was a young guy and rode a motorcycle to my job in a hardware store in Shreveport, I was nicknamed something like “rock star” because I always came in the door finishing up the song I’d been singing as I rode my motorcycle. As you can tell, my fellow workers at the hardware store were full of clever jibes.

All of this is the necessary background and prelude to the gift I got this Christmas from my brother Doug. It came in a box, without instructions, and I admit that I stared at it for a day, not knowing exactly what it was. It said it was an mp3 player, but when I turned it on I couldn’t seem to get it to work. Luckily, a friend came over and kindly pointed out that (ahem) the little screen was still covered with the protective plastic wrap. Once I peeled that off, low and behold, I could actually see a menu, which was the first step in my corruption.

It was the day after Christmas that I attached the earbuds, which are just pillshaped black pills – which seemed to lack the extruding part that fits into the earhole, as maybe that part is now considered bad for your health, I presume because the eardrum cannot endure too much reality sticking its snout in there – anyway, I put them in, then screwed them a little tighter as they seemed to want to fall out, and mounted my bike. And then a wondrous thing happened. My ears filled with Atlas Sound’s Quick Canal – which, by some accident, turned out to be just the kind of music earbuds were made for – and I had an intense aural experience within the capsule of myself, apart from the main of various cars booming and buzzing around me. The only thing I can compare that to was the first time I did mushrooms, when, after a little nausea, suddenly the same encapsulated feeling came over me. I was both entirely in the world of my senses and entirely immune from the world’s cause and effect junk, its tedious way of making you take all your steps to get to your destiny. That junk wears you down.

But this music that was simply filling me and my space – it whisked me away from the junkheap. I seemed to be at a very pleasant distance from what I was doing – pumping up and down on the pedals. It seemed unlikely to me that, say, if I swerved out into the street in front of an oncoming vehicle, anything major would happen. The vehicle would surely go right through me, the way a car can run right over a mirage of a puddle that shimmers before it on a hot road on a hot summer day – without a splash, and without disturbing the mirage’s cohesion. I was non-water.

Of course, I knew right away that this wasn’t going to last. That the more I listened to music on the buds, the more it would become routine, and the junk of the world would creep in. And I also knew that other people, most people, had been listening to music like this for years – all the walkman’s, the ipods, the mp3 players. I was like a man returning to civilization from a long walkabout. It was, however, new, and enormously exciting, to me – this juxtaposition of familiar scenery and my own soundtrack.

This was all the more spectacular for me in that, last year, after having had a severe case of swimmer’s ear, I became aware that the natural soundtrack - cars going by, people’s voices, wind, etc. – was in fact easy to disturb. For two weeks, I had heard it backwards and sideways – I heard the sound of cars going by me as this cross between a large gushing sound and a large sucking sound. I had seen people’s mouths move while their voices occurred behind my head. I’d become aware of myself in the picture – hyperaware that nature was an effect of instant editing.

As it should be, I think – I, who make my money by editing. In the beginning – in my cosmos – God said, let us edit.

Ganz normal

2009-12-29T18:34:00.000-08:00

I am immersed, at the moment, in German history, because I am reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus.

Serenus Zeitblom – what a name! Mann loved these kinds of names – is writing the biography of a composer, his friend, Andreas Leverkühn. The writing begins in 1943 - and continues through the devastation of Germany from the air, and from the Soviet advance. At almost the beginning, Zeitblom admits that the spirit of his biography goes against his ‘conscience as a citizen:.

‘And yet there is something that some of us fear – at certain moments that seem criminal even to ourselves, whereas others fear it quite frankly and permanently – fear more than a German defeat, and that is a German victory. I hardly dare ask myself to which of these two persuasions I belong. Perhaps to a third, which yearns for defeat constantly and consciously, but with unrelenting agony of conscience. My wishes and hopes are compelled to resist the victory of German arms, because my friend’s work would be buried beneath it, covered with the curse of proscriptions and forgetfulness for perhaps a hundred years, thus missing its own age and receiving historical honor only in another.”

Zeitblom is too moderate to ask himself more general questions about that third category. And yet, who among us has not felt intimations of it during this ice age of reaction in which we live, cocooned in the ephemerally invulnerable systems erected since the beginning of the Cold War, feeding our intellects on our irritation and imaginary apocalypses? Imaginary, I say, for us – not for, say, your average Baghdad dweller. And of course, for those who have eyes to see, the minor apocalypse – to give it its true historical scale – of an American middle class that has been persuaded, in the age of Reagan, to cut its throat and think, while it is lapping up its own blood, that it is enjoying the very champagne of capitalism.

…
This has been in my mind as I have been watching Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (1980), by Helma Sanders-Brahms. This film was met with a barrage of criticism in West Germany when it was first released. Partly, this barrage was about the syndrome Sebald identified – the desire to forget the war, meaning, forget the bombing. That desire has notoriously turned about – unfortunately, the bombing is now being remembered as the great victimizaiton of the Germans. To forget or to remember are two sides of the same coin. The coin is called pathological normality. And Sanders-Brahms film is – sometimes unconsciously – a probe into that state. For one of the questions one wants answered about that bombing is: why was there no revolt against a state that had so evidently and plainly led the nation into the abyss?

The question naturally arises from the common perception that the Nazis succeeded because they produced prosperity. They quickly brought an end to Weimar’s economic collapse, and so became immensely popular. This, at least, is the story. If it is a good story, though, than the utter collapse of that prosperity, the systematic burning of German cities, the dumping of burgerliche Deutschtum literally on the ash heaps of their homes should have prompeted, by the same logic, the overthrow of the Nazi regime.

But this didn’t happen. In fact, the passivity, the acceptance of the bombing, seems to be of a piece with the acceptance of defeat, acceptance of the occupation, acceptance of the Adenauer regime – acceptance after acceptance. In a sense, what died in the allied bombing was the idea that there was a place for revolution in Europe. The velvet revolution was, of course, not one – it was the mere final collapse of governments who could no longer rule. It was no more a revolution than the collapse of the Habsburg empire was a revolution – it was a defeat.
No, I would say that the end of revolution as a European reality, at least in the twentieth century, was this lack-of-an-event that occurred in 1943-1945. The lesson of Nazi Germany was learned by both sides in the Cold War, who managed a double movement – prosperity on the one side and a managed and total vulnerability on the other. Myself, though, I’m more interested in the structure of this pathological normal state. This inability not to be normal.

In DBM, the narrative voice – Sanders-Brahms voice – introduces us to the meeting of Lene and Hans – her parents – at a dance in which Hans tells Lene that the only thing that matters to him is seeing her again. And she says: “Glucklich. Ganz normal. Nur es in diesem Zeit geschiet. In diesem Land.”

And that is the keynote of the war that comes – ganz normal. The bombing – ganz normal. Hans’s shooting of women ‘terrorists’ – ganz normal. The journey of Lene and her mother through a wasteland of burned out cities. Ganz normal. For Sanders-Brahms, the twist here is that women in Germany – while the men were away at the front –could take control of things. Of their lives – a control that was taken away from them after the war, in the Adenauer era. In a way, one feels that this is a sort of blind cul de sac – ignoring the substance of that control, that control of German women in Germany in 1943, holding onto the ganz normal. The film was received, and still has a reputation, as an expression of feminist film-making – but I don’t believe that the feminist theme is really separable from the theme of pathological normality.

In the middle of the film, Lene wanders with Hanna in a wood. At first it seems to be winter – then spring. Hitler dies, a voiceover samples the voice of Donitz’s surrender – and Lene begins to tell her daughter the story of the Robber Bridegroom, a story that was brought by French refugees to Germany – the old story of Bluebeard. A story that includes, in Lene’s version – a path to the bridegroom’s house of ashes, and an old woman sitting in the house who warns the bride – look around you, you are in a house of murderers!

Those who know the film will see that here, I am skewing my interpretation to the scenes depicting the war. The thread I am looking for here is not the feminist one, taken by most commenters on the film. Or: it relates that moment – all our hopeful moments, all the politically progressive moments that have made life so much better – to a war culture with which we must deal, or perish.

My definition of utopia: when the ganz normal is not a state of collaboration in an ongoing state sponsored crime.

By the waters of babylon -the 00s

2009-12-27T08:27:00.000-08:00

I notice that people are summarizing the decade. What was good about it? What was bad?

On a personal note, the aughts were without any doubt the worst decade of my life. I became permanently poor, I destroyed my social life, and I made the worst of all career choices – to become a freelance writer – just when that career, so gloriously begun in the Western world by Daniel Defoe, laid down and died. A better way of saying this is: my personal life died in the aughts. Even I don’t care about it any more. that is how dead it is.

So there was that. But on a larger level, there was the country I live in, America. I paid far more attention to politics than is good for one’s sanity over the last ten years. My conclusion about American as an enterprise is rather like Jeremiah’s about Israel: “And from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed: her princes are become like harts that find no pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer.” America has always been half con game, but there was always something hopeful and naïve on the other side of the table. It now takes a huge act of faith to think that it isn’t all con game. And it is sheer ignorance to think that, at the moment, something good is being generated by a culture that, on the negative side, contributes a quarter of the human generated CO2 in the atmosphere. In cosmic bookkeeping terms, Jeremiah says it best: “Jerusalem hath grievously sinned; therefore she is removed: all that honoured her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness: yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward./
Her filthiness is in her skirts; she remembereth not her last end; therefore she came down wonderfully: she had no comforter.”

You can’t beat the prophets for a pithy summary.

For those who have eyes to see, parables of this comfortless state are all around. My favorite, at the moment, is a debate being waged on the eco blogs about jingle mail, to wit: should you feel guilty about walking out of your house and mortgage if you are underwater? According to Calculated Risk: “Nearly 10.7 million, or 23 percent, of all residential properties with mortgages were in negative equity as of September, 2009. An additional 2.3 million mortgages were approaching negative equity, meaning they had less than five percent equity. Together negative equity and near negative equity mortgages account for nearly 28 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage nationwide.” As has been observed by many, when businesses – say Morgan Stanley – find themselves saddled with underwater properties, the jingle is immediately in the mail. But often, householders go down with the house. Why? The answer Nietzsche gave was: slave morality. Nietzsche lived in primitive times! We now speak of asymmetrical norms. That means, what Morgan Stanley does is done as though a god did it. Mere mortals, however, should pay forwever, even unto their blood and bones. However, Nietzsche has found some new and unexpected advocates:

“Go ahead. Break the chains. Stop paying on your mortgage if you owe more than the house is worth. And most important: Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong.

That's the incendiary core message of a new academic paper by Brent T. White, a University of Arizona law school professor, titled "Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis."

White contends that far more of the estimated 15 million U.S. homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages should stiff their lenders and take a hike.

Doing so, he suggests, could save some of them hundreds of thousands of dollars that they "have no reasonable prospect of recouping" in the years ahead. Plus the penalties are nowhere near as painful or long-lasting as they might assume, he says.

"Homeowners should be walking away in droves," White said. "But they aren't. And it's not because the financial costs of foreclosure outweigh the benefits."

To the rightwing, that nest of demonic voice and the double bind, this is the advocacy of loosing the immoral tide. What? Homeowners operating guiltfree to stick it to the gods? I thought the best summation of the decade, from the rightwing point of view, was in the comment thread on Mark Thoma’s Economists view post, Should You Feel Guilty About Walking Away?

“If the deal was "too good to be true", as we see know, afterwards; why did so many of us accept it hook-line-and-sinker? If it were not for the fact that, like others, we thought we could make a quick-buck for little effort?”

The writer, of course, sees this as a wonderful argument to imprison people in their negative equity palaces. Myself, I see this as the final play of the dirty decade: first, the elite – the Bushes, the Greenspans, the press, the tv – proposes an ‘ownership society’ in which the Lion of poverty lies down with the lamb of self interest as the government does what it does best (seeking and finding meaningless wars to fight in perpetuity) and the householder does what he does best with "his money’ – takes those risks that makes capitalism so sexy. During this wash phase, the chatterers tell us that the housing market is no bubble, but a solid investment guaranteed to last forever. Then, in the second, drying phase, we get the ‘it was the fault of the suckers’ line – they knew the deal was ‘too good to be true’! We need to equip the gods with sharper forks, to pitch into the skins of these sinners who have now been revealed!

Myself, I think the demons, as always, can only operate if they are taken seriously. But if one sees them as the ludicrous beings they are, then one is free – at least of this misplaced guilt. But the larger aspect of too good to be true is, of course, the way the entire country operated in the aughts. My comment in Mark Thoma’s thread sums up what I think about the past ten years:

“You - I'm assuming this is Americans - have many things to feel guilty about. The invasion of Iraq, the decimation of Afghanistan, global warming. Everyone in this country should feel very guilty that so far, a good half a million or more Iraquis have died, and 2 million are refugees, on account of a ludicrous war we started.
But walking away from your house when it is underwater - there's no reason at all to feel guilty about that. The only bond between the people and the banksters is one of pure coercion.
Don't waste your guilt.”

In conclusion: I think we should go down to the waters of Babylon, look back at the horrorshow of the aughts, hang our harps on the willow trees, and weep.

“But something happens to everyone”

2009-12-26T09:27:00.001-08:00

It is after we get a little bit bigger and stop playing with LEGOS and building blocks that we accept as a fact that you can’t build a house out of doors and windows. Such a house is an absurdity! Even the least little hovel, even a tent with a mere flap for a door, should have an enclosed space beyond that flap; the whole point of the flap or door is to lead into the enclosed space. The whole point of a window is to break the monotonous grip of a room, its fist around you. But the room doesn’t exist for the window! That would be carrying the revolution too far.

And yet, even though this is the wisdom we absorb as surely as the hair starts to sprout on various parts of our bodies after we are children, still, when we start building an article, a story, a poem, a thesis, a dissertation, a novel, etc., how often do we find that the rule of doors and houses is damn difficult to follow. Indeed, there is a certain type of critic since Aristotle which likes to judge the house exclusively by the back door – does it open out onto good fortune and a marriage? Or does it open onto suicide, the daughter hanging by the rope in the tomb, the self-blinded, exiled king? Yes, that back door, the gentlemen of the press – and the producers in Hollywood – tend to hang around it.

As for me – oh, I’ve written for decades now. I’ve written since I was sixteen. True, the juvenilia is long trashed; the writing of the 80s is mostly lost, as is that of most of the nineties – my breadcrumbs, in which I had Hansel’s confidence that I could follow them back to all the projects I left behind me, have been eaten by indifference, lost boxes, weather, moves, and broken computers. Oh the world’s indifference – and my own! And yet, when I gather up the work that’s left, that I can get my hands on, what does it amount to?
Doors and windows.
In the writer’s world, this is the thing that drives one to suicide. Oh, besides the contingent things – sickness, poverty, a broken heart, the dimming of one’s wits. But I am speaking of suicide from vocational reasons – or perhaps I should say, suicide from within a vocation. Despair is what happens when one understands, fully, that the door is for the house, and the window is for the room – and yet one feels all too intensely the boredom of the room, of putting up the walls, of the work of kitchens and bedrooms. Yes, even if it is a burrow, the tedium of this jigsawed, continuous space.

That space can make me sick. And soon, very soon, after I embark upon a project, I have to fight the urge to put in another door or window. Glorious ingress, glorious egress, glorious panes of glass.
Yes, to punch out a space for a window that is high enough, commandingly high, so that I can jump out of it into the arms of a cremating eternity.

merry merry

2009-12-24T19:05:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas, my brothers and sisters!
And here's some Henry Purcell.

tora bora remembered

2009-12-23T07:47:00.000-08:00

I’ve been pleased to see Peter Bergen’s reassessment of the fuckup of Tora Bora, published in the New Republic, has had a small effect on the chattering class – it even gave Maureen Dowd a heart palpitation or two. The report itself is full of excuse speak for the officials involved, and does not dare venture into speculating that Osama's escape was the best thing ever to happen to Bush. It is all about Osama "slipping away," not being let slip. That would never, ever happen, of course. Thus, instead of including, for instance, information that would put Tora Bora in context - for instance, the notorious airlift of Taliban officials into Pakistan from Kunduz - Bergen's depiction of a Pakistan was on the U.S. side, at this time, is shall we say, dubious. Still, it picks up on one central fact - the American military response in the Afghan war sucked. This is in marked contrast to the snow job put into effect by the media at the time. In December 2001, you’ll remember, the chattering class was in ecstasies over our powerful and purposive president, Bush, and his team of Vulcans, who, in the cave paintings that have been excavated from time in a site near the Potomac River, are all depicted with giant hard phalluses. To understand how extraordinarily bad court society is in D.C., one has to read, say, Slate from that time – a goldmine of the conventional wisdom all dressed up like contrarianism.

Here, to get us into the spirit of the media, circa 2001, is the last graf of a Time magazine story from December 09, 2001, filled with fun factoids about the ‘craven’ Taliban and their inevitable defeat by the forces of good, aka the Americans. It ends with this kick-ass graf:

“Though the American commanders still counseled patience last week, they will not put up with inaction for long. Afghan forces told TIME they spotted U.S. and British commandos heading into the Tora Bora mountains last week, traveling in pairs, shouldering heavy supplies and carrying rifles. There were more soldiers on the way, backed by U.S. gunships, bombers and Predator drones, ready to pounce on their prey. It's a safe bet that if bin Laden is holed up in the snowdrifts of Tora Bora, with his hosts defeated and on the run, he still harbors hopes of making a great escape. It's a safer bet that the U.S. would love to see him try.”

Yeah, that Osama didn’t know who he was up against!

My Limited Inc. blog has long been on this beat. I’ll reprint here what I wrote on July 28, 2006:

I have nursed my own conspiracy theory about another incident in the “war on terror … ttt-terrorism… ttt-terrorists.” In fact, I am very surprised that this incident has attracted so little attention. Perhaps it is because the Lefty side that opposes Bush has such ambiguous feelings about the Afghanistan war that it doesn't want to investigate what it means to leave a terrorist group on tap. I’m talking, of course, about the battle of Tora Bora, and the escape of Bin Laden into Pakistan.

Here is an instance, I think, when incompetence and conspiracy are two faces of the same coin. What really happened at Tora Bora has been reported, as most of the fuck-ups of the non-war have been reported, long after it really happened. To disarm the news, simply delay it for enough years that people don’t care any more – that does seem to be the strategy of the Big Fix in D.C., and it certainly works on the journalists. None of them, so far, have taken the hint from Suskind about Bush’s meeting with the CIA in August, 2001 and deepened it, so we still don’t know have a complete sense of our unpreparedness due, almost uniquely, to the apathy of the reigning potentate.

Anyway, I recently came across Army Times reporter Sean Naylor’s account of the battle. According to Naylor, the incompetence factor (although he doesn’t put it so bluntly) can be laid at the feet of General “Kick me in the ass” Franks, who operated in our heroic Afghanistan war as a conduit for the senilities of Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld, of course, didn’t want the Afghanistan war to involve regular troops, on the theory that that is where the Russians went wrong. No, we’d used bombing and our super duper special forces – initial decisions that we are paying for today. Anyway, the American force that approached Tora Bora at the end of November, 2001 was extremely small, and depended on Afghan allies that were busy feuding with each other. According to Naylor, as the siege proceeded, the Air Force flew over the twenty mile passage between Tora Bora and Pakistan and recorded “hot spots” on their heat sensing equipment. Now, CENTCOM, unbelievably, had never considered the possibility that Al Qaeda’s forces could escape from Tora Bora – thus, there were no guards on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the hot spot data did provoke some consultation:

“The Generals in Kuwait recommend[ed] bombing the positions as soon as possible. But Franks [who, you will recall, bravely lead our heroic troops from a boat in Florida] and his staff did not see it like that. “They might be shepherds,” was Control Command’s attitude, according to two officers who sat in on the video-teleconferences in which the matter was discussed. At CFLCC that theory didn’t wash. The idea that scores of shepherds were tending to their flocks at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter was implausible.”

Implausible is a kindly word. Let’s recall what was happening back at the scene in Tora Bora. This is from the NYT Magazine’s rather thorough article about it in 2005:

“The American bombardment of Tora Bora, which had been going on for a month, yielded to saturation airstrikes on Nov. 30 in anticipation of the ground war. Hundreds of civilians died that weekend, along with a number of Afghan fighters, according to Hajji Zaman, who had already dispatched tribal elders from the region to plead with bin Laden's commanders to abandon Tora Bora.” – Mary Ann Weaver, NYT, 9/11/05

Recall, also, that at the time Franks was displaying this untoward shepherdophilia, the U.S. was accepting payment from the Northern alliance in captives gathered at random – the camel driver, the Avon salesman, the cab driver – and subjecting them to the waterboarding, beatings, and sometimes murder that they obviously richly deserved.

So if it wasn’t kindness that drove Franks, what could it be? Well, LI’s search for a theory would begin by asking who would gain an advantage by a stripped down force of Al Qaeda escaping to Pakistan. Hmm. Well, they would provide a ready reminder of “terror” if there were people in the military and in the White House who intended to use the 9/11 attack to provoke, for purely political reasons, further wars that would aggrandize their shaky political position and – oh joy – unleash the fruits of the war culture, giving the government an excuse to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, especially in the Red States, and sweetening the retirement of every general who went along.

The problem with this theory is that it implies that the White House is full of cretinous, treasonous creatures who would flush the interests of the country down the toilet if it gave them an extra meal or two at Signatures restaurant.

Hmmm.

RICO CAPITALISM IN THE AGE OF BUSH-OBAMA

2009-12-22T09:30:00.000-08:00

“Now he's got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with a bill, to Paulie. Trouble with cops, deliveries, Tommy... ...he calls Paulie. But now he has to pay Paulie... ...every week no matter what. "Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Had a fire? Fuck you, pay me." "The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me." Also, Paulie could do anything. Like run up bills on the joint's credit. And why not? Nobody will pay for it anyway. Take deliveries at the front door and
sell it out the back at a discount. Take a 200 dollar case of booze and sell it for one hundred dollars.
It doesn't matter. It's all profit.”

– Goodfellas

The merger of good business practice and racketeering in the 00s was embodied by the private equity firm, which made the Mafia look like punks. Two hundred dollar cases of booze were nothing when you buy a company with money you borrowed with your potential purchase as capital, thus adding the company’s cost to you to the company’s total debt load, from which – because you have been so successful! – you paid yourself a management fee, and then appointed undertakers to break the balls of any of the employees who’d been there long enough to, say, get a pension, or to have an emotional stake in the company’s success – deadwood, in other words; then you sell off the parts of the company that are working, which earns the management company, those private equity sweethearts, another management fee; and finally lead the company into bankruptcy, thus screwing the banks and the investors, the latter of which had been sitting on the sidelines swallowing pap about the efficiencies brought to the company by the private equity junta. Having followed the fuck you – pay me! Business plan, the private equity partners have long moved on, although not before putting a proper legal distance between the business they picked apart and the consequences.

Mattress companies, shoe companies, if it lives and breaths, if it produced value, if it employed people and was the result of honesty, toil, and the identification of the employees – well then, it deserved, from the racketeering rational choice point of view, to be fucked.

That was the trade – the bright side was that it got the thumbs up from economists, politicians, everybody in the know, all the bright ones in our Bush-Obama culture. You know, the ones who have shoved so much shit down our throats that we have gotten to like it, that it just seems normal to wake up with that taste of plutocratic turds in our mouths, it is just who we are, it is just what living in the Do Tread on Me Nation we call home is all about.

That this was done to Readers Digest sorta figures. Symbols are attractors, and what better symbol for a brisk deathmarch through the valley of the shadow of fuck you than the magazine that, in its humble way, embodied conservative middle brow Cold War culture? The army jokes, the first person accounts of American heroism, the vocabulary builder, the Cold War rants about all the usual topics: drugs, Communism, delinquency. Plus the condensed books, Ultra-Moderne – much like Campbell’s Condensed soups, showing that the process of assembly line production could be applied to the novel. It was a sign of middle class tastelessness – of working for the Middle Brow man - to have bookshelves full of Readers Digest books – in my family, we certainly did. I eagerly went through those books when they came, laughed at the humor in uniform, built my vocabulary with the vocabulary builder, and learned the anti-Communist facts of life. Ronald Reagan’s biographers say that he was an earnest reader of the Digest, and he often quoted from it – which makes sense. In a sense, Reagan embodied the whole RD ethos.

Including the reversal of what you would expect a conservative company to do. Just as Reagan’s experience of the only business he ever knew – the movies – gave him a, to say the least, skewed notion of the relation between labor and business, Reader’s Digest evidently treated their employees, in the HQ in Chattaqua, NY, with the kind of princely beneficence that would have softened Karl Marx’s heart. The Sunday NYT story about the decline and fall of the magazine includes this anecdote about the owners, DeWitt and Lila Wallace:

Al Perruzza, now a senior vice president, recalls a dinner in the early ’70s at which Mr. Wallace rose, clanked a glass and announced that, effective Monday, everyone at Reader’s Digest would get a 10 percent raise. He sat for a moment, conferred with Mrs. Wallace and then stood up again.
“My lovely wife doesn’t think that’s enough,” he said. “So effective Monday, it’s 15 percent.”
He rose a third time and announced a cost-of-living increase.
“We had spent literally weeks preparing a budget,” Mr. Perruzza says with a grin. “I was sitting with the president of my division. The guy went ashen.”

As the NYT tells the story, Readers Digest, back then, was an incredible cash cow – much to the Wallace’s amazement. Having figured, when he began the business, that he could make as much as 5,000 dollars per year, DeWitt and his wife were rather stunned by how much they really did make:

“By 1929, circulation stood at 290,000 subscribers and brought in $900,000 a year — more than $11 million in inflation-adjusted dollars — according to “American Dreamers,” a book about the Wallaces. By the 40th anniversary of Reader’s Digest, Time tallied up the magazine’s achievements: 40 editions, in 13 languages and Braille, and the best-selling publication in Canada, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Peru — and on and on. Total worldwide circulation was 23 million.”

So they did things like make their Chappaqua campus a nice place to work by hanging art on the wall: "Paintings by Picasso, Monet, Degas,Matisse, Renoir and van Gogh — museum-worthy décor was just another perk of working for a publishing phenomenon, one that sold millions of magazines and books a year, a readership rivaled only by the Bible. Although comparing sales of the scriptures to those ofReader’s Digest has always been unfair, because, as The New Yorker noted in 1945, “the Bible had a head start.””

That art, seen by the 3,000 employees and their family members, has now, of course, been stripped (“Take a 200 dollar case of booze and sell it for one hundred dollars. It doesn't matter. It's all profit.”). In the place of those paintings – o symbol calls to symbol, the worm that turned calls to the mindboggling serfs we are today! - we have this:

“…the walls are dominated by inexpensive prints and lots of corporate propaganda.
That’s right: corporate propaganda. Posters in the corridors of this mostly empty building trumpet something called the FACE plan, an acronym for fast, accountable, candid and engaged. One poster offers simplistic how-tos for running a meeting. (“Ensure that the right people are at the table.”) Another is headed with the words “Vision Statement” and uses lots of empty white space to underscore the point: “We will create the world’s largest multiplatform communities based on branded content.”
That mantra, and all the posters, are the brainchild of Mary Berner, the kinetic former president of Fairchild Publications who landed here with the backing of Ripplewood Holdings, the Manhattan private equity firm that orchestrated the debt-fueled takeover of Reader’s Digest.”

Our fast, accountable and engaged Mary, at a modest 125,000 a month, has surrounded herself with a coterie of “blondes” – as they are called by the stunned remnant of RD culture – to ‘reconfigur[e] the innards of the company’ – as NYT says, building up our biz vocabulary. Reconfigure – strip what isn’t nailed down, burn employees, create on-line presence.

It is a heartwarming story, this, the rescue of Readers Digest, with Ripplewood Partners throwing the company a big life preservers, made out of lead, after RD fell on hard times post-9/11. It wasn’t just that Readers Digest had been rendered rather useless by the internet. It was also that the Feds shut down RD’s sweepstakes. That killed the company with its base. It is one thing to have the condensed works of Taylor Caldwell on your shelves, but quite another not to have a shot at winning the sweepstakes. Underneath the idea of earning your money, we all long for the main chance. Ripplewood saw the bleeding, and stepped in to suck the creature dry.

“Ripplewood, led by Tim Collins, its chief executive, saw turnaround opportunities as well as a chance to roll up the fund’s own media properties, including Time Life Inc., the direct-marketing company that was formerly part of Time Warner. Ripplewood put in $275 million of its own money and had a bunch of partners, which included Rothschild Bank of Zurich and GoldenTree Asset Management of New York.
But the $2.4 billion deal piled so much debt onto Reader’s Digest’s balance sheet that it tripled the company’s interest payments, to $148 million a year. The Great Recession hurt ad sales, of course, and devastated sales of direct-marketed books. Instead of the single-digit percentage growth in revenue that Ripplewood was banking on, revenue declined.
In January, the company laid off 300 people, about 8 percent of its staff.
But even with those measures, the company did not, as Ms. Berner might put it, make its number. In August, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.”

HENRY (V.O.)
And, finally, when there's nothing
1 left, when you can't borrow
another buck from the bank or buy
another case of booze, you bust
the joint out.

CUT DIRECTLY TO:

LARGE CLOSE UP OF - HANDS

making rolls of toilet paper being kneaded into long rolls
with Sterno.

CUT TO:

HENRY AND TOMMY shoving wads of Sterno paper into the
ceiling rafters.

HENRY (V.O.)
You light a match.

I won I won I won I sorta won I won something I placed...

2009-12-20T15:05:00.001-08:00

Hooray! I placed third in this 3 Quarks contest! Thank you all! And a special thanks to the artist formerly known as Praxis, Mr. Duncan, for nominating me.
A round of drinks on me, uh, in spirit at least.

Drunks

2009-12-19T10:28:00.000-08:00

On the night of December 31, we had suddenly enter into our room a troupe of maskers. One of them, dressed in white, held a scythe that he sharpened with a piece of wood. This one came right up to me and threatened me with the scythe, saying Christ willed my death. As much as the commencement of this farce seemed strange to me, the end of it was equally ridiculous. One was the devil, another was death, some were musicians, the rest were men and women who danced to the sound of the instruments. Death and the devil looked at each other, saying that all men would soon be in our power. We found very little to amuse us in this dance of the dead; we promptly gave death the wherewithal to drink to our health. As soon as we did so, the company bid us adieu. – Johann Georg Gmelin.

In Science, first hand, an odd, English language journal published by Akademika Koptyuga, there’s a fascinating article on the Gmellin-Mueller expedition to Siberia and the theme of alcohol by A. Elert, copiously illustrated with marvelous lubok – which are playing card sized woodcuts evidently produced for a mass audience.

The article is aptly summarized thus:

“This article will show our readers that the Russian people “took to the bottle” three centuries ago, which, however, did not prevent them from spreading over the vast area and building a most powerful empire in the world history. There is something wrong about it — too much passion in these talks about the “universal alcoholism” of Russians and too many extreme views. Our compatriots have long gotten used to treating vodka as something almost sacred, something exclusively Russian, but in the last fifteen years they have been able to compare. The comparison proves paradoxical — Europeans drink at least as much as we do but liquor is not a domineering feature of their national character.”

I’m not sure if it actually shows that Europeans drink at least as much, but it does show that the state did everything it could to promote drinking. One recalls Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism: “In a note to Molotov written in 1930, Stalin stressed the need to increase vodka production to pay for military expansion in view of the imminent danger of Polish attack. Within a few years, state vodka production had expanded to supply as much as a fifth of total state revenue; by the middle of the decade, vodka had become the most important commodity in state commercial stores.[44]

This was not new. Elert finds some amazing statistics from the Siberian expeditions of the 18th century. “According to regulations, a private of marine detachments was procured monthly with 16 charkas (cups) of vodka (a charka contained about 130 milliliters, that is privates were given about 68 milliliters of vodka daily) and 60 mugs of beer (a mug
contained about 1.625 liters, that is the average daily norm was 3.2 liters. “ Six pints of beer per day, plus a good sized vodka chaser.

The ethno-history of the psychoactive revolution – Courtwright’s name for the massive global trade in sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea, alcohol, opium, hashish, and then all the synthetics – which came in waves, from the 16th century up to this very moment – has been written either from the provincial perspective of crime, or the narratives of fiction. Epidemiology only gives us its statistical epidermis. Economics, of course, sees all commodities as ‘widgets’. Yet, stepping back, one notices a strange global pattern in which the state – the Imperialist state - operates as both pusher and cop. Not only did the slave labor that was massively enrolled to grow and refine these ‘necessary exotics’ decisively shape third world societies in the modern era, but the distribution of the psychoactives to indigenous populations served both as a buffer allowing for the acculturation of the harsh “free labor’ regime that succeeded slavery, and as an agent of moral disintegration to destroy rural idiocy – or nomadic idiocy, or the idiocy of island societies. Famously, North American Indian societies were demoralized by the alternatives of being marketed liquor and being ‘reservationed’ in order to protect them from liquor – among other things. The same thing has happened to the Australian aborigines, or the Papuans.

In a rather famous paper, ‘Alcohol and Ethnography’, Robin Room has claimed that anthropologists, who come from the ‘wet generation’ – the generation that, in reaction to the disastrous temperance experiment of the 10s and 20s, is ultra-cautious about the policy of alcohol control and inclined to see the social side of drinking – refuse to look at the epidemiological facts. However, he doesn’t extend his critique to all psychoactives. The sugar that has become a standard ingredient of processed foods has had a devastating effect, in terms of obesity and diabetes mellitus, on indigenous peoples around the world. Yet the epidemiological fact that this is happening has elicited little interest in the social forces that bring together sugar and the native – or natural, the old phrase from King James time. The naturals, the clowns, the marked down populations, the human product – the targets. Only an economics that is informed by ecology can really help us distinguish psychoactive commodities from others, and try to make sense of the history of modernity.

There is a nostalgic strain within anthropology that posits a twofold history of alcohol, in the first phase of which alcohol was controlled ritualistically. It was part of Bakhtin’s world of the carnival. But as the structures of ritual fell apart – as, in my vocabulary, ritual gave way to routine – the old controls on drunkenness were gone. The idea that drinking was, before, in a setting such that it would be controlled ‘naturally’ seems doubtful – one has simply to look at Gmelin’s description of Siberian villages to see that psychoactives have always possessed a chaotic force. But it may be true that old forms of demoralization – old forms in which demoralization was part of the entire life of the village – were supplanted by new forms that couldn’t be so controlled.
Because that world of routines is so defined by the division of labor, we don’t see other character types – it is as if they disappeared. It does seem to me that the drunk certainly has taken on certain characteristics of the holy fool, or yurodivya. One of the few papers that looks at drunks from the point of view of their social role – Philip Dennis’ The role of the drunk in a Oaxacan village (1976) notices the privilege accorded to the drunk.

IN AMILPAS, a village in the Valley of Oaxaca,2 a drunk wanders down the street, lurching from side to side and shouting insults at all he encounters. Little children run indoors, and people approaching from the other direction dodge off into side streets to avoid meeting him. Ordinary village street life ceases as he approaches and resumes after he has passed. Local residents seem to regard drunks as one of the hazards of village life, along with rabid dogs and loose oxen. There is a similar element of physical danger: if the drunk is armed, he may injure someone, and, in fact, most intra-village quarrels and homicides occur after drinking. My wife and I have vivid memories of dashing into our adobe house along with neighbors when bullets from a street drunk started zinging through the trees. We thought he was shooting at our Coleman lantern!

Drunks do present real physical danger, especially when armed with pistol or machete. However, the social danger represented by the drunk seems to be feared almost as much as the actual physical danger. The drunk does not have to observe the polite conventions which allow everyday life to go on in the village. Instead of a polite, "Good morning, how did you awaken?" he may greet a fellow citizen with an accusation of stealing from the village treasury, failing to repay an old loan, making someone ill (witcheraft), or some other kind of misbehavior. The visiting anthropologist quickly learns that drunks are likely to accuse him of nefarious purposes: being an evangelist, selling data to an enemy village, using villagers for his own gain. Like his informants, he learns to avoid drunks and situations where drunks are congregated. The drunk is likely to say things that were better left unsaid, to voice suspicions that are only suspicions, and by their nature are incapable of being either proved or disproved. He threatens to tear down the polite facade of ordinary social life in the village.”

And so we come to the character type on the very limit of the allowable, the one who exploits embarrassment, who turns shamelessness into an instrument of social power, facing a social power that has assiduously supplied him or her with the psychoactive means, the social power that manufactures the human product – here we face a contradiction worth pondering, no? “Death and the devil looked at each other…”

Thoughts about Adam Smith's spectator

2009-12-16T11:10:00.000-08:00

In Part III, Chapter 1 of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith unfolds the theory of the ‘spectator’ that was soon take up, in Germany – by such thinkers as von Gentz, Smith’s translator, spy for the British, aid to Metternich, a factotum of reaction and yet, a romantic – and in Russia by Karamzin.

So, what is the moral role of the spectator and how does it relate to sympathy?

First, Smith posits a certain irreducible sociability that is natural to man.

“The principle by which we naturally either approve or disapprove of our own conduct, seems to be altogether the same with that by which we exercise the like judgments concerning the conduct of other people. We either approve or disapprove of the conduct of another man according as we feel that, when we bring his case home to ourselves, we either can or cannot entirely sympathize with the sentiments and motives which directed it.”

This is a rather odd way of going about looking at the origin of our moral sentiments – the question that occupies the chapter. Instead of an origin, we have, from the beginning, a circuit of projections, in which the need for a principle of approving or disapproving our conduct is assumed to be already in place. In fact, this principle and society are so bound together that without the latter, the former shatters:

“Were it possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face.”

The mirror is the first moral technology – Smith continually refers to approbation and disapprobation as being formally the same kind of thing, whether it refers to the form of the body or the form of the action. Whether the former is pleasing or not (on what level and to what purpose he does not say - myself, the good freudian, I suspect that we could dive into the blank of sexual desire here and not come out for a long, long time) is a model for the way in which one decides whether an action is pleasing or not. The whole machinery of sympathy can’t get going until we can sympathize with ourselves – that is, in a sense, until we can identify ourselves with our image in the mirror.

The mirror, here, by a quite orthodox metamorphosis of tropes, becomes a theater, and the self a spectator; and Theater then becomes the courtroom, the chamber of judgment.

“We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct. If in this view it pleases us, we are tolerably satisfied. We can be more indifferent about the applause, and, in some measure, despise the censure of the world. secure that, however misunderstood or misrepresented, we are the natural and proper objects of approbation. On the contrary, if we are doubtful about it, we are often, upon that very account, more anxious to gain their approbation, and, provided we have not already, as they say, shaken hands with infamy, we are altogether distracted at the thoughts of their censure, which then strikes us with double severity.
III.I.6
When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. The first is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard to my own conduct I endeavour to enter into, by placing myself in his situation, and by considering how it would appear to me, when seen from that particular point of view. The second is the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was endeavouring to form some opinion.”

These links – the mirror, the theater, the courtroom – are not new. Shakespeare of course plays with these same tropes, and he gets it from a humanist tradition that goes back to the Roman moralists and to St. Paul. But one remembers that the Pauline tradition shows a proper mistrust of the glass into which one peers; and the stoic tradition used the metaphor of theater as one of the instruments by which the sage divests himself of the delusions he is surrounded with – to know that one is playing a part is an advance towards playing no part at all – for nature is the end, not the beginning, of culture. As in Epictetus’s Discourse:

“…remember that tragedies have their place among the rich and kings and tyrants, but no poor man fills a part in a tragedy except as one of the Chorus. Kings indeed commence with prosperity: “ornament the palace with garlands”: then about the third or fourth act they call out, “Oh Cithaeron, why didst thou receive me?” Slave where are the crowns, where the diadem? The guards help thee not at all. When then you approach any of these persons remember this that you are approaching a tragedian, not the actor but Oedipus himself.”

The Enlightenment philosophes inherited stoicism as the counter-ideology to Christianity, a hidden code developed by the humanists since the time of the Renaissance – and there was a great outcry when La Mettrie, for instance, attacked and mocked that code publicly. But in actual fact that code had been disgarded long before, by the libertines and their salon culture. Oedipus, in Smith’s view, will only find when he approaches himself that he himself is a spectator and an actor (and in deforming himself by tearing out his eyes, Oedipus performs the ultimate anti-social act under the terms of Smith’s moral sentiments – for what could be more morally suspect than to damage one’s face, that very model of the self, and to make it structurally impossible to gaze into the mirror? Nature is not an end, then, and we see in a glass now in order to learn sympathy – caritas – and not pride. Smash the mirror and one smashes society itself.

Politics as theater, theater as the mask of interest

2009-12-14T17:37:00.001-08:00

“… he himself was known as the Moor or Old Nick on account of his dark complexion and sinister appearance.” – Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, his life and environment.

The sinister appearance is, of course, Berlin’s own sly Cold War addition to the reasons given after Marx’s death, by Mehring and Liebknecht, for the nickname that had attached itself to Marx in his student days in Berlin – and one he was apparently fond of. In one of his last letters to Engels, he signs himself, “Old Mohr.” Mehring claimed that this was his nickname among his daughters and his wife. Jerrold Siegel, in Marx’s Fate, makes an intriguing argument that the nickname is overdetermined – referring as much to Karl Moor – the disenfranchised son in Schiller’s The Robbers, as to Marx’s skin color.

Marx as the Moor and Marx as Karl Moor the robber – it is as if the spirit of Marx future passes over the face of Marx past and present, as the Mohr and the Moor keep signifying, the perpetual alien in the midst of the great transformation – that opponent on the edges to imperial power – and the more fairy tale like robber chief, out of the peasant’s mouth. Remember, Schiller was, as well, Dmitri Karamazov’s poet – as well as the critic Grigori’ev, on whom Dmitri was partly modeled, the theorist who divided Russia into predator and prey, the alien aristocracy and the authentic Russian people.

The Old Mohr ‘s bent towards seeing politics in terms of theater was more than a favorite metaphor – or rather, one might well ask why it was a favorite metaphor. On Limited Inc, I have doggedly but intermittently pursued the notion of the adventurer – not a category resolvable into the division of labor, or of class, but one that traverses classes – as a ground form for the artist and the politician. Marx’s own sense of the theatricality of politicians – and his lack of a sense, at least until the 1870s, for politics as an institution distinct from class interest – is an important element in Marx’s political writings. Often, the enemy – Palmerston, for instance – is appreciated in literally theatrical terms:

“In the last weeks, "Punch" has fallen into the habit of masking Lord Palmerston as the clown of a puppetplay. This clown is a well known disturber of the peace by profession, a lover of drunken beatings, a hatcher of scandalous misunderstandings, a virtuoso of brawls, only at home in the midst of general confusion, that he directs, in which he throws the wife, child and finally even the police officer out the window, in order in the end, after much ado about nothing, he slips out of the noose himself, more or less unscathed and with teasing ‘concern’ about the course of the scandal.” – Marx, 1855, "Neue Oder-Zeitung, my translation.

Where would Marx have seen this puppetplay? Hampstead Heath, to which he and Jenny and the daughters would repair on Sunday outings, according to Wilhelm Liebknecht (who also called him Mohr). Marx, after all, came from a generation of German intellectuals who read their Wilhelm Meister, and knew that all the old gods were behind the puppet play.

In the fifties, Marx developed his greatest analysis of politics as theater in The fourteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Here, and in his articles for the New York Tribune, Marx sets forth his idea that politics is the expression of class interest. His theatrical metaphors always point to the fact that politics lacks any structure of its own. There are the players, and there is the audience. Aesthetics and politics melt together:

Men (Die Menschen) make their own history, but they don’t make it out of free pieces, nor under self chose circumstances, but rather under immediately found, given and inherited ones. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And when they seem busy overturning themselves and the things, in order to create what hasn’t yet been, even in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they fearfully conjure (beschwören) the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing their names, battle cries, costumes in order in these worthy garments and with these lent speeches to make new scenes of world history [neuen Weltgeschichtsszene] Thus, Luther donned the mask of Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in that of the Roman Republic and Empire, and the Revoluton of 1848 knew nothing better to do than here to parody 1789, there, the revolutionary tradition of 1793-1795. [My translation]

Similarly, when giving political advice, Marx does not think of parties – he thinks directly of worker’s associations. In his address to the Central committee of the Communist League [Bund] of 1850, Marx’s advice is given not in terms of parliamentary procedures, or in terms even of a party – though we might retrospectively suppose that the Bund was just that. Rather, this is the snare of the petty bourgeois democrats, who want to enroll the workers in “a party organization, in which general social-democratic phrases dominate, behind which their particular interests are hiding, and in which the specific demands of the proletariat for the sake of dear peace must not be brought forward. The outcome of such a union will be wholly to their benefit and wholly to the disadvantage of the proletariat.”

And so it is through theater that the true interest of the workers, in the political sphere, are lost – although it is also through theater that the fearful revolutionaries, who have appeared in spite of themselves on the world historical stage, give themselves the courage to act.

Certainly one could argue that Marx was right, in regard to the interests of the working class. But it is just on this point – the point of interest, the point of defining classes by their interest and politics as an instrument of interest – that we have a gap in the analysis. Why, exactly, is theater called for here? How is it possible, if politics is simply costume and masking, to ‘fool’ the audience? While Marx certainly has the fundamental elements in his hands in the 1850s, what he doesn’t have a comprehensive sense of interests yet. He has, instead, a strong, Machiavellian sense of politics as theater, and a growing sense of how the capitalistic economic system works. In order to gain an anthropological and sociological – rather than theatrical – sense of politics, he needs something more than the Enlightenment theory of mysterious superstitions, or the idea of religion as a palliative for pain – the opium of the people. He will have to root out from himself, in making his universal history, certain assumptions about interest – about benefits (Vorteile) and disadvantages (Nachteile). He will have to learn to measure on multiple scales.

ho ho!

2009-12-11T18:48:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been an idiot. A couple of people told me I made the cut at 3 quarks, but I thought they were talking about Duncan's original nomination of me. But no - apparently this blog made the second cut. Hey hey! A round of tiaras, if you please.

At this point, we have to advice our readers that if we win, or place third or something, we will become swollen headed and arrogant, trample over the people who have helped us to the top, and in general act like Ann Baxter in All about Eve.

You've been warned.

more on climategate

2009-12-11T10:15:00.000-08:00

I am fearfully and wonderfully made, the Psalmist wrote. The same thing can be said for any scientific theory. Far more convincing than the ‘fact’ that there is a scientific consensus on global warming is the fact that the literature on the measures and mechanisms of climate has become global itself over the last thirty years, and is in that stage in which numbers of models are thrown up to address the thousand and one anomalies suggested by the data flow. Climatology and its provinces – climate botany, mineralogy, hydrology, physics – is really a subordinate to earth system science. And we are watching its rich period, when multiple climate ‘objects’ are constructed. Although I am not happy with the common ‘construction’ word, with the implication of human agency and intention, for it doesn’t quite stretch far enough to tell us how these objects appear, often quite unexpectedly. I am fearfully and wonderfully made, but my runny nose isn’t – its an unexpected result of the making. And thus we may speak of all constructed objects with this precaution, which is that they tend to construct in turn.

Out of all that information, picking out a trend in global climate, if there is one, has been no mean task. One of the things that separates the denialist cult from the science of climatology has been the refusal to assess this vast amount of data in scientific terms – looking for links, explanations, tendencies. Rather, it is dealt with on the level of a political issue, period. This is why Easterly’s blog post was such an exercise in charlatanism, from the oozy intro of Crook to the foreshortened and ignorant reference to the Wegman committee to the completely comic ‘shock’ expressed by the idea that one group of scientists would try to suppress the views of another – comic because Easterly’s discipline, economics, is notorious for such things. I have no need to go into the Cowles commission – one merely has to point to the experience of Card and Krueger, economists whose data suggest that the minimum wage doesn’t cause unemployment, a sacred canon among the neo-classicals, and the backlash against the two. Here’s a taste of the rhetoric Krueger stirs up, from something called the Economics Policy Journal blog:

“Alan B. Krueger is co-author with David Card of Myth and Measurement . Somehow in this book, they manage to throw overboard the law of supply and demand, to reach the conclusion that "the claim, that a higher minimum wage cuts jobs, lacks support."

At one point, they report among a number of "main empirical findings" that (page 3):
Increases in the minimum wage also generate a "ripple effect", leading to pay raises for workers who previously earned wages above the minimum wage.
It is difficult to understand how Card and Krueger can even be considered economists with such beliefs. If one does not believe in the law of supply and demand for the labor market, can one believe in the law of supply and demand, at all, for any market?”

I can’t imagine, say, Chicago School economist John Cochrane disagreeing with that. If the empirical evidence goes against the theory, in economics – throw out the evidence.

However, basta, I have other fish to fry in this post. I want to show how the evidence for climate change – Global Warming, to give it the press name - relates to the general framework of climatology.

From a common sense perspective, the argument for global warming is not problematic. That is, we have every reason to expect that an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (for instance, CO2), in the absence of any organic or earth systems means to capture or recycle that increase, will have an effect on the atmosphere and ultimately on the globe proportionate to its chemical and energetic nature. The Superfreakonomics guys failed to understand this elementary fact, although they quote with approval the man who most clearly sketched it out, Ken Caldeira. Here’s a pertinent quote, from John O’Donnell, formerly of Princeton’s Plasma Physics lab, now a VP for a Solar energy company, reprising the Caldeira presentation regarding Carbon Dioxide:
“
…each molecule of CO2 released thermal energy when it was formed — that’s why we formed it. In the case of electricity generation, about 1/3 of its thermal energy went out a wire as electric power, the rest was released promptly as waste heat. But each molecule of CO2, during its subsequent lifetime in the atmosphere, traps 100,000 times more heat than was released during its formation.”

Thus, from a common sense view, CO2 would seem as likely to warm the earth as starting a fire in your fireplace is likely to warm your living room. Or, indeed, as the gasoline in your combustion engine is likely to run the car.

But the common sense view does not take in the great feedback system that takes that greenhouse gas, and others, out of the atmosphere. Throwing in a complex set of negative and positive feedbacks (the latter being things like, the more water warms, the less it can absorb CO2, and the former being things like, the more CO2, the richer the leafage of certain plants), common sense only gets us as far as a hypothesis. [For an overview of simulations of CO2 increases in the atmosphere, see Multicentury Changes to the Global Climate and Carbon Cycle: Results from a Coupled Climate and Carbon Cycle Model by G. BALA, K. CALDEIRA, A. MIRIN, AND M. WICKETT in Journal of Climate, November 2005.]

It is important to note, here, that the denialist case has to deal with the common sense framework, too. Either they have to show that the CO2 is somehow absorbed, or that its energetic effects are blunted, or that the capacity of the earth system is such that the increase in thermal energy is a wash.

Now, given this starting point, one wants to get a crude sense of the history of the system – the system of climate. In fact, we have only a very tiny sample of the earth’s climate to go on – good continuous records of air temperature don’t go back very far, at most, in some places in England and France, 200 or so years. Reconstructing the climate over the last 4 billion years is, then, a matter of a great deal of deductive work. One needs clues. One of those clues is, indeed, the mix of gases in the atmosphere, which is why ice cores from Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctica are so important to climatology. Here we bump into a fact that seems to be unappreciated in the popular discussion of global warming – when we quote the scientists about past climates, we are quoting theories that depend on our knowledge of the present climate system. In other words, assumptions about the effects of greenhouse gases are implicit in these past climate projections. Thus, we ‘know’ that there was a temperate spike in the Eocene – the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum – because we read the evidence with the same tools that are now being applied to the present climate. We’ve taken drillings from the ocean floor and analyzed them “through measurement of stable oxygen isotopes”. [Huber, McCleod, Wing, 198] And after the hypothesis of a massive and sudden increase in the temperature of the oceans, scientists looked around for causes and found evidence for a massive release of… a greenhouse gas. Methane. The gas that is trapped, by the way, in the tundra, which at the moment is, according to every reasonable ground temperature measurement, warming up considerably – in geological time, the warming is split second.

Thus, it looks like the denialist position not just go against the scientific ‘consensus’ – it must present a different picture of climate patterns in as much as those patterns are consistent with and read by our current climatology paradigm. It can get around this task by claiming that, a, the statistical models used to put together disparate weather data into trends is flawed, or b, by citing counter evidence that would show, for instance, that the CO2 is not having the effect that is being claimed for it.

You’ll note I’ve left out of account the whole anthrogenic vs. sunspot controversy. I leave it out because it is based on a misreading of the global warming claim. That claim is primarily about the increase in CO2 and its effects, and secondarily about the source of that increase. The climate can warm or cool without anthrogenic intervention. This has been picked up by denialists, curiously enough, as some superargument. Here we leave science per se, and enter the realms of social pathologies, where the argument is really about blame and honor. I love to blame my own self – one of my favorite things – but this counts for little in the controversy thus far.

the existential issues in the global warming debate

2009-12-09T08:22:00.001-08:00

I am thinking about climate denialism with relation to one of the great questions in sociology, which goes: “what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?”

Indeed. When I was in Atlanta for Thanksgiving, I had a discussion with Doug, my levelheaded brother, about global warming. Doug is – or at least, I hope he is going to be – the thermostat king of the Southeast. At the moment, he is making good money replacing thermostats at various heavy use sites, like hotels. Long may those day renters fiddle with their hot and cold!

And so, like my brother Dan, and unlike me, he strides about in the world, rubs shoulders with plenty of talk radio listeners, middle managers, the salt of the earth who have spent their allotted time building their precarious monuments to the self of houses, pickup trucks, entertainment centers, skill sets, marriages, kids. They are the main, and I am not part of the main. I am an island. I work alone, editing mostly academic papers, never really seeing my customers, and all my monuments to self have crumbled to the ground before my eyes.

Everybody has an edge. My edge is that I am a loser. But – because that, too, must be wiped away from the perceptive apparatus in order to see clearly - I defer to my bro in terms of his grasp of the social psychology of the American middle class.

So I asked him if one of my intuitions is right. I’ve long thought that the reason the great American middle (Southeast division, at least) is so convinced that the issue of global warming is fake is because that middle thinks that this is a sneaky way to blame it. The Americans fought communism because they felt the communists blamed them for their lifestyles – although at least the communists could be said to envy those lifestyles, and want to take them over and use them for their own obscure purposes. But to these people, the environmentalists are worse – they just want to destroy everything for the birds and the beasts. They aren’t even pro-human.

Doug did think that I was partly right. The people he talks to, the main, do feel like they are being blamed for global warming.

Paul Krugman’s blog, today, is about why global warming seems to turn up the crazy. Climate rage, he calls it. He has two explanations:

“First, environmentalism is the ultimate “Mommy party” issue. Real men punish evildoers; they don’t adjust their lifestyles to protect the planet. (Here’s some polling to that effect.)

Second, climate change runs up against the anti-intellectual streak in America.”

I think Krugman may have grasped surface aspects of the issue, but not the deep structure. That structure is existential. The blame is existential (you are condemned for your entire way of life) and the resentment is existential (you are condemning me for my entire way of life – and who are you?).

The science of climate change enters into the matrix of blame and counter-blame in America and makes an emotionally charged demand: that one take an objective look at the totality of American lifestyles. What this demand ignores is that objectivity is not emotionally neutral. On the contrary, objectivity touches on humanity’s greatest fear – the fear of being prey, of appearing without any excuse or mitigation in the hunter’s gunsight.

Thus, the pettiness and superstition that has become the vernacular of denialism is not, I think, simply about American “anti-intellectualism.” One of the things I have disliked from the very soles of my feet about the pro-science side of the climate change debate is the reliance on authority, instead of argument – the scientists have formed a ‘consensus’, so that answers the question. Climate gate shows that, as one would expect, a consensus is a political thing, which consists of infinite strategizing. Real anti-intellectualizing occurs only when intellectuals are treated as authorities to whom we, who have presumably gone through high school and can judge for ourselves, are supposed to bow down.

I see that appeal on the liberal blogs a lot – plus the disciplinary policing. And I think: this is bullshit. It donfuses respect with belief.

Any amateur – myself, for instance – should be able to grasp the objective issues of climatology, and judge for themselves the evidences for the climate change – which, while called global warming, doesn’t necessarily mean uniform warming in all places on Earth at all times. It seems to me that the climatologists have created a very impressive case – and they have done so not by moving from certainty to certainty (which would be prima facie evidence that something funny is going on), but by the stumbling, adjusting, adhoc-ery that is the real history of science, from germ theory to quantum physics. In my opinion, the image of consensus –by concealing the real work of science – actually undermines the case for climate change. It makes any discrepancy seem like a matter that discredits the whole, and makes the scientists seem like conspirators, “covering up’ things. In fact, discrepancies are to be expected. The models that climatologists use to project the sum of the earth’s weather not only go forward, into the future, but go back, into the past. But what are they made of? They are made out of information we have gathered from the relatively puny percentage of earth time where we have recorded temperatures – 150 years out of the Earth’s 4.5 billion. We build a structure that both projects and retrojects climate conditions. Our structure is shaky. And will probably so remain – science being about probabilities, not certainties. It is not, though, as shaky as, say, the market in derivatives.

So, let’s take up state of the art in dendrochronology in our next post.

Bill Easterly, denialist

2009-12-07T19:29:00.000-08:00

“After the EPI gathering, Peter Dorman, an economist at Evergreen State College with a gentle, bearded air, related an e-mail exchange he once had with Hal Varian, a well-respected Berkeley economist who's moderately liberal but firmly committed to the neoclassical approach. Varian wrote to Dorman that there was no point in presenting "both sides" of the debate about trade, because one side--the view that benefits from unfettered trade are absolute--was like astronomy, while any other view was like astrology. "So I told him I didn't buy the traditional trade theory," Dorman said. "'Was I an astrologer?' And he said yes!" – Christopher Hayes, Nation.

After Chris Hayes’ article came out, there was approximately zero voices calling for Varian’s head because he was “suppressing” the other side of the trade debate. On the other hand, Climategate, the latest adventure in rightwing massaging of the news as rightwing coup, has already produced a scalp: Phil Jones, the head of the Climactic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, whose emails showed that he thought “one side – the global warming side – was absolute” enough to deny a venue to climate change denialists, has fallen on his sword.

Here's what happened: Russian hacks (paid by somebody) steal a cache of emails, which show that Jones worked hard to prevent the appearance of the opinion of two dissenting climate scientists in the IPCC report in 1999. And then there is this (from the Times (UK): “Phil Jones, talks about using a “trick” to “hide the decline”. At first reading, this easily translates as “deceiving [politicians, other scientists, everyone] into believing the world is warming when it is actually cooling”.
… Jones is talking about a line on a graph for the cover of a World Meteorological Organisation report, published in 2000, which shows the results of different attempts to reconstruct temperature over the past 1,000 years. The line represents one particular attempt, using tree-ring data for temperature. The method agrees with actual measurements before about 1960, but diverges from them after that — for reasons only partly understood, discussed in the literature."

The news as shock tactic has, by now, a familiar shape. After the rightwing bloggers and tv news people cycle a version of these events, it is time for the brigade of “serious” right wing personalities to show that, more in sorrow than in anger, they too are now coming to see the nefarious business of climatology for what it is. Bill Easterly, well known for his anti-foreign aid positions in economics (and not known at all for protesting at the “suppression” of anti-free trade positions in economics), mentions such well known climate scientists as Clive Crook and George Will as bringing sweetness and light to the subject. Here is how he introduces Crook:

“Clive Crook is such a calm, sensible, non-ideological voice, that if you ever get him really upset, you’re in deep trouble.”

Of course, that introduction is, to say the least, odd. Crook is far from non-ideological, unless by that we mean, committed to a neo-classical version of economic theory with a few neo-Keynsian highlights. More importantly, in those Homeric epithets, we read nothing about his contribution to climate science, or, really, to anything. Rather, Easterly is slyly leading the witness, so that we accept him as a moral entrepreneur.

And as this voice of calm, of course, Crook lashes out – why, the East Anglica suppression of dissent ‘stinks”.
And then we get this bit:

“One problem that Clive points out is that some climate scientists don’t know that much about statistics and show little interest in consulting statisticians even while they are basing their finding on statistical analysis. The Wegman report on the “Hockey Stick” controversy has this amazing summary:

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community.

Once the real statisticians looked, one “Hockey Stick” result fell apart: the conclusion that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by {the} analysis.”

Ah, that’s the spirit. Quote no real statistician whatsoever. Defame some members of the paleoclimate community, but don’t name any names there, either. Don’t reference any paper in which the ‘real statisticians’ looked at the numbers for the 1990s.

Don’t, for instance, reference this easily available account of an Academy of Science 2006 investigation, in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

“This is not the first time Mann's work [the hockey stick] has been put to the test. In 2006, Texas A&M climatologist Gerry North was asked to lead an investigation for the National Academy of Sciences.

North worked with three statisticians and several high-ranking climate experts, picking through Mann's arguments and data. He said the panel came away with a few quibbles over Mann's methods and when they re-did it, the graph didn't have as dramatic an upward slant as the original hockey stick.
But overall, "we thought that qualitatively the paper got it right. The last 30 years were warmer than any 30-year period in the last 600 years and plausibly the last 1,000 years."

North said he did not agree with the way that some other researchers created a continuous graph of global temperatures over the last 1,000 years by combining the proxy data in the past with thermometer data in recent years.”

This information is available to Easterly. Because he is a tenured academic, he can shovel misleading information all day and all night on his blog, and nobody will “suppress” him. But we should emphasize again and again that Easterly could not name a single “real” statistician who has published any paper in any journal with the results he claims, or rather quotes our non-ideological puppy dog as claiming. Unfortunately, Easterly is one of the pr academics, so they will quote him as an expert as he carries water for a rightwing propaganda machine. That is who he is.

Now, if we want to actually ask ourselves what this controversy is about, we should do a little research. I did some. I went to factiva, Jstor and Ebsco. Relatively easy things to do. I know, researching for such as Easterly might be hard to do – that is why he has grad student factotums. I don’t even know if he has ever heard of JSTOR. He should check out the wonderful world of research some time, though. He might even bump into a “real” statistician.

I did. As has been pointed out, the problem climatologists face, at the moment, is not the fudging of the temperatures. It is the paucity of temperature readings. After all, climate change involves shifts not only in day peak temperatures, but ground temperatures, water temperatures, and night temperatures. We did not have satellites a hundred years ago. But paleoclimatologists have learned to use indirect clues. They use, for instance, the presence of fossil evidence of animals whose habitats they know about to map older regimes of climate. They use fossilized pollen to understand what flora flourished in this or that geographic zone. And they use tree rings.
Generally, when trees are growing under optimum conditions, the rings are farther apart – the growth is more robust – then when they are growing under sub-optimum conditions. Weather is a part of this. So, too, are insect infestations, or indirect results oif weather – for instance, a canopy of higher deciduous trees can shadow a conifer, which would produce suboptimum growth.

Thus, we are looking for a variety of factors. This is a classic problem – it pops up in, for instance, measuring inflation. If I broke into the emails exchanged between members of the Boskin commission, which re-wrote the measurement of inflation in the 1990s, I am almost positive I’d find reference to tricks. As Easterly probably knows, the word trick is often used for technique – the trick is to do such and such. So when we apply hedonics to products to estimate how much better they are, we are applying a trick. But in fact, even before the Boskin commission, inflation estimates are always full of tricks. We have to weight variables. So, too, we have to weight variables in the case of the evidence of climate change. Just as the inflation of the price of, say, housing might not indicate overall inflation, so, too, the record of tree rings does not straightforwardly indicate climate change.

This is so supersecret, so covered up in the climatology community that it has a special name - the divergence problem – and a whole issue of Climate Change, edited by Jan Esper and David Frank, two Swiss scientists, was devoted to the issue this June.

Those are good names to remember, because Esper, Frank, Wilson, Carrer, and Urbanati wrote a paper that is statistically heavy entitled Testing for tree-ring divergence in the European Alps. It has statistics that even a genius, a sheer calm non-ideological titan like Clive Crook might be impressed – might even utter a non-ideological sigh, as he summoned, via ESP, his “real” statistician. Who I suspect is his booky.

This team had an advantage in that the Swiss Alps is a pretty well recorded area for the last 150 years. The record shows, as one would expect, that since the end of what Brian Fagan calls the little ice age – in around 1850 – temperatures have been rising in this area. So, they looked at the tree ring record and asked whether it can be reconciled to the temperature reports. If it couldn’t, that would be bad news, of course – that would mean that our projection of tree ring records into the past was skewed.

I’ll simply quote the abstract, here: “Here, we present a network of 124 larch and
spruce sites across the European Alpine arc. Tree-ring width chronologies from 40 larch and 24 spruce sites were selected based on their correlation with early (1864–1933) instrumental temperatures to assess their ability of tracking recent (1934–2003) temperature variations. After the tree-ring series of both species were detrended in a manner that allows low-frequency variations to be preserved and scaled against summer temperatures, no unusual late 20th century DP is found. Independent tree-ring width and density evidence for unprecedented late 20th century temperatures with respect to the past millennium further reinforces our results.”

Now, there is nothing as exciting here as, say, a totally convincing, unreferenced superreal, indeed surreal statistician, who is just pounding away on the temperature record. But this is a humble, like, real reference to real scientists studying real evidence. This is generally a foreign and yucky thing to economists. We know that Easterly could not, if challenged, find a single credible source for saying that the temperatures of the 90s were not the hottest of the decade. He just can't, which is why he hides conflates criticism of Mannn's hockey stick model with the temperature record. Easterly's blog post is sheer charlatanism. To quote our ever non-ideological friend, Crook, Easterly “stinks.”

PS - for more about the Wegman committee, see this link. I was amused to see that the Wegman group spent some time making up a social network chart to show how climatologists were 'incestuous' - too closely linked to each other. Meanwhile, Wegman appointed two other people to investigate the global warming stats, one of whom was a former student. I must say, the right is nothing if not boldfaced.

Special pleading

2009-12-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

Nicole at Rough Theory has a nice post up here about me. It helps me over a problem: on the one hand, I'd like to urge my readers to rush on over to 3 quarks and vote for me - on the other hand, that is a tacky gesture. But the hands don't have it - this is not either/or. In the sphere of rules, I have always believed, there are holidays. Which is the difference between me and the late Mr. Immanuel Kant, of Koenigsburg, Prussia. Also, there is the matter of the daily walk and the occasional powdered wig.

The deal is, Duncan nominated me for this post. I'm flattered, and, as you love me, so should you go to the 3 quarks site and vote for this blog.

Review of One Dimensional Woman

2009-12-04T08:19:00.000-08:00

La mère en prescrira la lecture à sa fille… -The epigraph of Philosophe dans le boudoir.

There is a story about the French feminist, Pauline Roland, that goes like this. In 1848, a faction of the socialist saint simonians had gathered together in Broussac, a village about 13 miles from Nohant, under their leader, Pierre Leroux. George Sand, who lived in Nohant, had been the one to persuade Leroux to move the village after Leroux had been officially exiled from Paris as a radical. Leroux, in turn, invited Roland to live in Broussac and assume the duties of a teacher. At the time Roland was being financially crushed under the burden of supporting her three children by her own labors; she did this because she had no intention of letting the fathers of these children intervene in any way in their lives. Thus, she felt that they had no duty to provide for the children – on the contrary. Paternity, she proclaimed, was a superstitious imposition. Another superstitious imposition, the monarchy, fell in France in 1848, and elections were subsequently held in, among other places, Broussac. Roland went to the town hall and tried to cast a ballot for Leroux, only to be refused admission. The story goes that when the police took her in for her attempted vote, she told them that she was “Marie Antoinette” Roland.

I think there is something deep about this story. On the one hand, Pauline Roland was a socialist. After her stay in Broussac, she returned to Paris and was an active member of the workers’ association that briefly sprang up in that city. It was for this subversive activity (as well as for “feminism” and “moral degeneracy”) that she was tried under Louis Napoleon and exiled to Algeria. According to the memoirs of a member of the printers union, Bosson, Roland had shrewdly sized Louis Napoleon up and was scathing about the way some union leaders – notably Leroux – were still unclear about Louis Napoleon’s intentions on the evve of the coup d’etat in 1851: “Pierre Leroux made an incredulous smile, he told me: I know my little Louis, he is incapable! Pauline Roland who was a frail creature, a mere breath, jumped about like a lamb: Your little Louis! But I love a thousand times more the butcher Cavaignac [leader of the reaction] than your little Louis!” [see Paul Chauvet]

On the other hand, as she knew – and as feminist historians from Marie d’Agoult to Joan Landes have noticed – the status of women worsened during the time of the French Revolution. The Romantic revenge against the women of the eighteenth century was codified in Napoleonic law. The great melody of equality, which found its voice in Olympe de Gouges and Condorcet, had its head cut off – for not only did Gouges, among other ultra women, go to the guillotine, but the culture of the salons, in which women, as Landes put it, could be the ‘adjuncts’ of power, was targeted for destruction by the revolutionaries and, to an extent, by Napoleon (whose vulgarities regarding Madame de Stael would have been looked upon as extremely distasteful under the ancien regime). By an irony of circumstances, Roland’s final trial, staged by Leroux’s “little Louis”, was less about her subversive activities than her shocking behavior as a wanton woman and a mother – which was exactly how Hebert had stage managed the case against Marie Antoinette in 1793.

‘Marie Antoinette’ Roland names, I think, the tension between feminism and the left. In the seventies, some feminists tried to straddle that tension by identifying patriarchy with capitalism. However, I can’t see this as anything other than a tactic of conceptual desperation, and certainly not a logical conclusion drawn from history.

The tension between a left that subsumes the historical female difference to reproduction (in keeping with a logic that can only see systems of production) and a feminism that often collaborates in its own narrowing to a series of consumer choice runs all the way through Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman, which begins by asking: “Where have all the interesting women gone?” The book is in the fine tradition of the political pamphlet, which takes its first duty to be flinging some extreme truths in the face of the public. For in the pamphleteer’s soul, the truth is always and forever extreme. It is a genre that Power excels at.

The book is both a plea for a useable past and a summing up of the dreadful uses made of feminism in the 00s: the bad faith feminism that provided the cynical grounds for our neo-colonialist adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, shoulder to shoulder, of course, with Saudi Arabia, that paragon of women’s rights; or the extension of feminism to mean, anything connected with a powerful woman, however dubious her politics or economics; or the Sex and the City feminism that normalized the independent woman as a consumer of gourmet chocolates and a really really fun person who happens to be oh so charmingly for equal rights for women.

Right off the bat, I am predisposed to favor this book. It is not only that I am a fan of Nina Power’s blog, Infinite Thought. It is that I am an intellectual thief of that site. Her site, in many ways, taught me how to write my own blog. When I first starting reading Power, I had started my blog already. But I didn’t know how what tone exactly to take. Was I going to write small essays? Make a link machine for friends? Use it as my diary? Power was one of the first bloggers I read who had figured out the genre, at least to my satisfaction, and I took many of the things I wanted to do for most of this decade from Power’s stylistic suggestions. She had Djed the mix of the theoretical, the personal, and the colloquial that I knew, immediately, was what you could do with a blog. Later, her use of montage like use of shock or mock images, a la John Heartsfeld, was something I decided to slavishly imitate. I was a blogger with an unknown tropism, and Infinite Thought was my sun.

In particular, Power figured out how to lower the ego of the blog. Many blogs – and mine included – are long arias of me, which can get tedious over time. Power, however, uses language as something that she can stumble over, transforming egotism into slapstick. This isn’t British self effacement, but a sort of juggler’s fumble. All of those funny “erms” and curve ball rhetorical questions in her blog posts have a function. It is through these techniques that she establishes an intimacy with the reader – for the fumble is a hand outstretched. It is a contact. It is a gesture that reminds us of the author’s sovereign right to touch. Benjamin, in his essay on Leskov, speaks of the tactile moment in the story, when the storyteller touches the listener, puts his hand on the listener’s shoulder. That self-interruption, that way of making the language something that actually comes off the tongue and is thus heir to a death no word itself could feel, is an extremely subtle move in the internet world – it is a quick, golden flash – and you have to look for it - for mostly, on the internet, every intimacy has been mimicked to death, and the storyteller’s touch turns out to be the cold, cancerous hand of corporate speak, poking you in the eye.

Thus, I read One Dimensional Woman, Power’s first book, against her already pretty formidable output. Although the book sometimes jumps around “like a lamb”, betraying its blog origins, the extended meditation on pornography, sexpol utopias, and the contrast between radical feminism and what Power calls the current attitude of “deflationary acceptance” – the era of normalized feminism – is a continuous piece of cultural criticism of a pretty high order. I am extremely sympathetic to her viewpoint – I believe Power is advocating for the sociability of pleasure, or what used to be called “volupté.” Thus, she mostly avoids the pitfalls of the sterile opposition between pornography and erotica – and, though it may seem like an oxymoron, she calls for something like a Habermasian pornography (I never, ever thought I would put those two things together! The universe truly is the Library of Babel, and everything will eventually conjoin with everything else). This is a strength of her materialist and productionist viewpoint. The weakness, however, is that, while she does explore the history of dirty movies and the 80s drive, by some feminists, to ban them, she doesn’t explore the larger history of feminist strategies and the persistent fissure that exists between the left and feminism. McKinnon and Dworkin, after all, were by no means the first feminists to turn the movement into a fight against a social ‘vice’. Feminists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Anglosphere – and even in Mexico – were allies, for instance, of the temperance movement. They crusaded against child labor, and against prostitution. Against the lineaments of gratified desire, feminism has always adduced the social fact of systematic violence – of drunken husbands beating wives, of the degradation, illness, and early death endemic to the prostitute’s trade, or – in the case of pornography – of the purported link with rape. Jane Gallup has suggested that feminism is divided between bad girl and good girl feminisms. One can question whether even irony can rescue that division from an infantilizing logic to which it reduces the feminist dialectic, but it does, at least, provide us with a sense of how feminism is divided on the question of the sociability of pleasure. In a sense, the normalization of feminism in the 00s, against which Power directs her polemic, is a normalization of a kind of bad girl feminism. For what is the solution to male drunkards beating their wives? Woman friendly alcohol. Woman friendly cigarettes, woman friendly porn, woman friendly products and services – by a strange dialectical twist, the bad girl alliance with the lineaments of gratified desire has driven this feminism into an advocacy of the female subject as an equal consumer.

Here, I wish Power had been a little more panoramic in her vision of feminism – and had not dealt simply with the movement as though it had sprung up almost exclusively in the late 1960s.

Yet this might be asking to much from a book that is intentionally as short as a bullet. What I really want to say, watching Power aimi for the heart of the era of normalized feminism, is: Shoot Nina! Shoot!

baudelaire - a displaced post

2009-12-02T08:03:00.000-08:00

I don’t love Lacan.
Derrida wrote an essay entitled For Love of Lacan. It was a reconciling essay, one of his frequent gestures of tendresse that are so in contrast with the guerrilla essays, like Limited Inc. Or a certain famous consideration of the postman of truth, starring Shem the Pissman and Shaun the post-postman. A folly and a frolic, that one. Derrida always had a surprisingly strong sense of solidarity with the community he wrote in, which is why his ethics exists under the sign of friendship. Which is one of the many reasons that I do love Derrida.

But I don’t love Lacan. And, in fact, I have rather despaired about a certain Lacanian vocabulary that has taken the place of a philosophical anthropology among left-leaning theorists. I know where it comes from, and I recognize that there was a historical and rhetorical necessity for some way of speaking of, say, the subject and the Other – but I feel in my bones that this moment has passed. Instead, the Lacanian vocabulary has become mechanical, ill motivated, unexamined, from the petit objet a to the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language – which I have a strong desire, a death wish, to bring down, as Samson brought down the temple of the Philistines.

As I am trying to interpret Baudelaire – and so release a certain image of the poet, let it unfold a destiny in my gnostic history of happiness – my thoughts keep turning to the other ‘addict’ – his semblable, his frere, E.A. Poe. Whose story, The facts in the case of M. Valdemar, is, according to an interview Derrida once gave, the silent third that accompanied the themes in Derrida’s first major text, on Husserl’s Essay on Geometry.

Poe is another transatlantic figure, a bi-locator born. And he figures in the story of Derrida and Lacan, who met for the first time in Baltimore:

“Thus, setting out again [je repars], when I met Lacan in Baltimore for the first time, in 1966, and when we were presented to each other by René Girard, his first word was, with a friendly smile: “So, we had to wait until we came here, in a foreign country, in order to meet!” And I remark here perhaps because of the problem of destiny-errance which awaits us and perhaps because of the name of death of Baltimore [bal de mort] (Baltimore, dance or trance and terror), Baltimore is also the city of Poe of whose grave I searched in vain in those days, but could in any case visit his house (I went to Poe’s place [chez Poe] in 1966, I remark here perhaps because of the name of death of Baltimore that the two unique times we met and we had spoken a little one with the other, it was a question of death between us and firstly in the mouth of Lacan. In Baltimore, for instance, he spoke to me of the way he thought he would be read after his death, and in particular, by me.”

PS- I am putting this post here, not at Limited Inc, where it belongs. I think I'll redo it for LI.

Bad sex and DIY sex

2009-11-22T08:45:00.000-08:00

And now for some bad sex writing:

So am I as the rich, whose blessed key,
Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,
The which he will not every hour survey,
For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.
Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,
Since, seldom coming in the long year set,
Like stones of worth they thinly placed are,
Or captain jewels in the carcanet.
So is the time that keeps you as my chest,
Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide,
To make some special instant special-blest,
By new unfolding his imprison'd pride.
Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,
Being had, to triumph; being lacked, to hope

Of course, that wasn’t really bad at all. Nor, of course, are the bits entitled “Bad sex writing” by the Prospect, the late Auberon Waugh’s brainchild. The English are a funny people – they will make bared bosoms such a tabloid standard that they become like the quilted sampler and Christmas Turkey, and at the same time complain loudly if some novelist describes the wanton flutings of fellatio, using terms that come to hand – cock, pee-slit, mouth, fingers. Of course, reading Auberon Waugh’s autobiography, one understands where the gingerly, if not psychopathically embarrassed attitude to sucking cock, or fucking, comes from.

However, the gleefulness of, say, the Guardian, who takes up the holy bad sex idea every year, can’t be explained by having Evelyn Waugh for a pater. No, this is the gleefulness of the stupid man who has had a genius inspiration: if you put the word bad before something, it will show that you are superior to it. And hence, your stupidity will be crowned as a form of taste, a certain brilliance, instead of the direct descendent of the fart sound of your giggling youth, back there on the back row. You can pretend that, well, Jane Austen, or somebody, did it better, or that it is much much better to imagine sex than to vulgarly denude the lovers at their play.

So you get things like this and then you get even worse things like this

“There's an assumption that it will involve writing the nuts and bolts, what goes where. Wrong. Try it. "His right hand slipped down her left thigh, as his left hand deftly undid the catch of her bra, and then he whispered in her ear … " – which one? Where's this guy standing? Or is he sitting? Perhaps lying? And what's she doing with her hands, right and left?

Writing about sex can be like a complicated game of Twister. You sit in front of your laptop, trying to work out where everything's going. It's worse than following the instructions for assembling flatpack furniture. Maybe there are some people who are turned on by DIY manuals, but for most of us they have the opposite effect. There are better ways for the writer to seduce the reader.”

The comfy suburban references to Twister and DIY, and the notion that there is something, oh, not so seductive when hands slide up thighs – no, we want a more elevated seduction for the “reader” – are enough to make a cat laugh. Too much, well, specificity, especially when the description of sex is supposed to seduce the reader – not, mind you, get the reader wet, hot, bothered, stiff. And yet of course, this is all utter bullshit, as we swim in currents of sex, sex as come on, in the newspaper world and in the world of the media in general.

Respectability, most rotten of moral codes, still holds sway among the twister game sets and the shopping carts. And behind it is, of course, consumer choice - for really, this is why the sex is so 'bad' - it rather makes a mash of the whole Sex and the city, sex as an accoutrement system. It is bad because it, well, makes sex so unsellable. So DIY.

Or as Rochester put it:
Unhappy cunt, oh comfortless,
From swilling plenty, fallen into distress,
Deprived of all its ornamental hair,
Fed with the empty diet of the air.
Divorced and banished from its dearest duck,
That proselyte to pagan fuck.
Assist ye powers
That bring down monthly flowers,
Come, come away, and in a trice,
Congeal these thoughts of ice.
Comfort my cunt, or give me your advice.

Judas, De Quincey and Lenin: on the worse, the better

2009-11-17T17:33:00.000-08:00

The famous phrase, “the worse the better”, is often attributed to Lenin. Supposedly, this is Lenin’s addition to the black book of political strategy, and no doubt in Hell he is discussing it over chess with Old Nick Machiavelli himself.

As far as I can tell, however, the phrase appears in Lenin’s works as a quotation from Plekhanov. In Three Crises, writing in 1917, Lenin sets himself the task of analyzing the revolution thus far – after the fall of the Czar. He remarks that so far, the demonstration, as a political form, has accrued a peculiar importance. And he backs away from the situation to analyze it:

The last, and perhaps the most instructive, conclusion to be drawn from considering the events in their interconnection is that all three crises manifested some form of demonstration that is new in the history of our revolution, a demonstration of a more complicated type in which the movement proceeds in waves, a sudden drop following a rapid rise, revolution and counter-revolution becoming more acute, and the middle elements being eliminated for a more or less extensive period.
In all three crises, the movement took the form of a demonstration. An anti-government demonstration — that would be the most exact, formal description of events. But the fact of the matter is that it was not an ordinary demonstration; it was something considerably more than a demonstration, but less than a revolution. It was an outburst of revolution and counter-revolution together, a sharp, sometimes almost sudden elimination of the middle elements, while the proletarian and bourgeois elements made a stormy appearance.

Contrary to the view that Lenin advocated a strategy of the worse, the better, Lenin was remarking that this strategy was being played out in the Russian revolution. It was a product of the natural history of the revolution, so to speak. The middle elements saw it, precisely, as a strategy because the middle elements did not understand the mechanism of class warfare. Thus, the middle was continually projecting intentions upon the Bolsheviks and the reactionaries, as though both were creating class warfare – when, to Lenin’s mind, the relationship was quite the reverse – class warfare was creating the Bolsheviks and the reactionaries.

Both we and the Cadets were blamed for the April 20-21 movement — for intransigence, extremes, and for aggravating the situation. The Bolsheviks were even accused (absurd as it may be) of the firing on Nevsky. When the movement was over, however, those same S.R.s and Mensheviks, in their joint, official organ, Izvestia, wrote that the "popular movement" had "swept away the imperialists, Milyukov, etc.", i.e., they praised the movement!! Isn’t that typical? Doesn’t it show very clearly that the petty bourgeoisie do not understand the workings, the meaning, of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie?
The objective situation is this. The vast majority of the country’s population is petty-bourgeois by its living conditions and more so by its ideas. But big capital rules the country, primarily through banks and syndicates. There is an urban proletariat in this country, mature enough to go its own way, but not yet able to draw at once the majority of the semi-proletarians to its side. From this fundamental, class fact follows the inevitability of such crises as the three we are now examining, as well as their forms.

Let me admit that I, like Lenin, find class warfare to be operating here before either side becomes conscious of itself; the sides come into existence to express the warfare. However, once they come into existence, they quickly develop a semi-autonomy in which, of course, they try to dominate the field of possible political routines. This is why, even though they come into existence as the expression of class warfare, they remain in existence as the expression of political warfare.

But my interest here is really in that caught middle. That middle of paranoid dreamers. For, whatever the truth about Lenin’s real thoughts, the idea that Leninism follows a strategy of the worse, the better is a very attractive reading of Leninism from the middle viewpoint. I’d claim that it is a reading that precedes the Russian revolution. In fact, I’d like to claim that we can see the seed of the idea in an essay De Quincey wrote about Judas Iscariot.

This essay is best known through a reference to it in Borges’ ficciones. Borges explains De Quincey’s point briefly before moving on to the beautiful heresy of a Swede named Runeberg, who, contemplating the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, came to the conclusion that Judas was, in reality, the true god-man:

“God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible - all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.”

Runeberg’s theory is, in one sense, the final chapter, the logical conclusion of the middle’s paranoid dream. It is a dream that finds a Judas under every rock.

De Quincey, one of the world’s great dreamers, dreams of a Judas who looks much like the Lenin imago of all the Old Cold War boys. His Judas is one of Burke’s “theorizers” – the treasurer of the disciples, the shrewdest among this naïve group, but upon whom “had not yet dawned the true grandeur of the Christian scheme.”

Believing therefore as Judas did and perhaps had reason to do that Christ contemplated the establishment of a temporal kingdom -- the restoration in fact of David's throne; believing also that all the conditions towards the realisation of such a scheme met and centred in the person of Christ, what was it that upon any solution intelligible to Judas neutralised so grand a scheme of promise? Simply and obviously to a man with the views of Judas, it was the character of Christ himself, sublimely over gifted for purposes of speculation, but like Shakspere's great creation of Prince Hamlet not correspondingly endowed for the business of action and the clamorous emergencies of life. Indecision and doubt, such was the interpretation of Judas, crept over the faculties of the Divine Man as often as he was summoned away from his own natural Sabbath of heavenly contemplation to the gross necessities of action. It became important therefore according to the views adopted by Judas that his master should be precipitated into action by a force from without and thrown into the centre of some popular movement such as, once beginning to revolve, could not afterwards be suspended or checked. Christ must be compromised before doubts could have time to form. It is by no means improbable that this may have been the theory of Judas.

This outline of Judas’s relation to Christ sounds remarkably like the relationship of Pyotr Verkhovensky to Stavrogin. It also sounds like the kind of conspiratorial dream that entranced De Quincey, whose own dreams, massive opiate structures, seemed like conspiracies themselves, to whose inward meanings De Quincey had no privileged access, always the small man just outside the glass.

But to return to Lenin’s point, we should ask: why would De Quincey represent a middle that was being crushed? Wasn’t he living in the golden summer of equipoise, the Victorian age?

De Quincey wrote his essay in the Victorian age, but his sensibility, by his own account, was formed in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age. Older than Hazlitt, he never gave himself to the revolutionary cause. He was a reactionary from the cradle – a romantic reactionary. It was not the Middle’s triumph that he saw, but the long twilight struggle with a growing, secretive mass of revolutionary societies that would do anything to undermine the middle. His politics were the precise correlate of his dreams, which were illuminated, from the inside, by symbols that seem to be stolen from the future.

Let's talk about Leskov and making love

2009-11-15T10:28:00.000-08:00

Leskov is the neglected 19th century Russian writer. Surely he links Gogol to Bely. Surely Lady Macbeth from Mtsensk is one of the finest stories ever written. You don’t believe me? Read this paragraph. Katerina Lvovna, the Lady Macbeth, and her lover, her husband’s servant, Sergei, well known as the village Don Juan, are discussing the imminent arrival of the husband, who has been away on business. The discussion takes place in the back yard, “on a carpet spread under an apple-tree in blossom.” At first the two have tea, then Sergei pouts, then Katerina pouts, then they make up.

“An old clerk who slept in the shed heard through his sound sleep how the silence of the night was broken by whispering and soft laughter, as though mischievous children were conferring together how best to make fun of an old man; then came roars of laughter and merriment as though saucy mermaids were tickling somebody. All this came from where Katerina Lvovna, bathed in moonlight and rolling on the soft carpet, played and frolicked with her husband's young clerk. And the white flowers kept falling, falling, from the old apple-tree until at last they ceased to fall. In the meantime the short summer night had passed, the moon hid itself behind the steep, high roofs of the warehouses and stared more and more wanly at the earth; from the kitchen roof came a piercing feline duet; this was followed by spitting and angry snorts after which two or three tom-cats crashed noisily from the roof on to a heap of boards nearby.”

How can one do justice to a paragraph like this? Already, we have in the back of our mind a notion of trees, fruit, a man and a woman in a garden. We begin first with old age and we end with the squabbling of cats in heat. At the very center of the paragraph is a superfluity. The white flowers do not merely fall – they “kept falling, falling”. What role is played by this extra “falling”? In a sense, that extra “falling”, that luxurious fall of the blossoms, that impossible shower of blossoms on the lovers, is linked more to the sin, the fall, the sex, the series of betrayals that mark the story, than any description of copulation. Fucking and falling, falling – what happens here is both sense and music. It is in the music, the repetition of falling, that the fantastic, the saucy mermaids, beast and human, are released. Shklovsky, in The Theory of Prose, writes:

“Art is not a march set to music, but rather a walking dance to be experienced or, more accurately, a movement of the body, whose very essence is to be experienced through the senses.”

This satisfies me a bit – but only a bit, because is it true that the whole body moves? Does not this falling move the tongue? To write prose – to really write prose – is to feel a distant but distinct sensation in your tongue. Some, doubtlessly, write prose outloud – although we are so used to reading in silence that, when a movie shows a writer writing, he never writes out loud. To present what is written, the soundtrack imposes a voice-over. A more imaginative film director might simply supply what happens when, deep in the tongue, a quiver is felt. The words would be sounds, heard as though from underground, and not fall into the distinct semantic shape that is so confidently assumed by the voice. There would be an entangled murmur. This is the wind that blows over the page, and blows, even, over the page on the computer screen. And what does the tongue do, on this night when the apple blossoms are falling, falling? The tongue and the lips of the lovers touch, taste each other, like saucy mermaids they tickle each other. They lean upon the stronger sensation, but that sensation, that culminating chord of sex, is coaxed out of the smaller sensations, the pick up sticks of touches, touches. The extra fall is the real fall – there is this luxury in loving, or rather in making love, in the heartfelt surface of love, where all is sense and nonsense at once.

ps - of course, I know that the falling, falling is English, but - as a reviewer in the Slavic and Eastern European Journal recently noted of a new translation of Lady Macbeth - Leskov's prose is saturated with repetitions - which are silently erased in the new translation. So I stand by the larger spirit of prose that I am invoking, here.

the zona salutes our heros of freedom on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the wall

2009-11-12T19:48:00.000-08:00

Via Felix Salmon, I notice that today is a day to be celebrated. No, not Veterans Day. Ten years ago today, the wall came tumbling down – that horrible wall between commercial and investment banks. Two brave freedom fighters, Larry Summers and Senator Phil Gramm, led the charge for freedom, free enterprise, under the heart stirring slogan, “government is not the solution”. The next year, these two mousketeers of market equilibrium, the ownership society, and making the credit flow (at up to 30 percent per annum) like water for the poor! also brought down the horrendous regulations on mortgage lenders that strangled them like Laocoon’s sons were strangled by the sea snake.

Let it not be said that the struggle wasn’t tough. They faced a woman! O typical, broody women – this one, Brooksley Born, was simply an economic illiterate. Far from wanting to set us free – all of us, every last member of the country club – she nattered on about how collapsing the distinction between investment banks and commercial banks, backing up commercial banks with U.S. money, and allowing investment banks to play trillion dollar games with derivatives was somehow – this is the kind of naïve, housewife vocabulary she used… wrong. Women just don’t understand the important things, so luckily she was railroaded, and it turned out good for everybody! The Rolling Stones has a where are they now survey that does your heart good:

"Today marks a decade since the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era safeguard that prohibited the commingling of commercial and investment banks. The deregulation gave rise to all-in-one financial behemoths like Citi, ushered in the too-big-to-fail era, and nearly toppled the global financial system.

The hubris expressed during the signing ceremony at the Old Executive Office Building ten years ago today will make you throw up in your mouth a little."

Dickenson reports on the bipartisanship shown at a ceremony in which both Clinton and Phil Gramm got to speak. Gramm’s words, in particular, pierce my heart with arrows of great joy:

In the 1930s, at the trough of the Depression, when Glass-Steagall became law, it was believed that government was the answer. It was believed that stability and growth came from government overriding the functioning of free markets. We are here today to repeal Glass-Steagall because we have learned that government is not the answer. We have learned that freedom and competition are the answers. We have learned that we promote economic growth, and we promote stability, by having competition and freedom. I am proud to be here because this is an important bill. It is a deregulatory bill. I believe that that is the wave of the future. And I am awfully proud to have been part of making it a reality. (Applause.)

And, as Dickenson reports, Gramm has ridden the wave of the future into making millions at UBS bank. A bank that deigned to let the government be the answer just a teensy weensy bit last year, when it got a 52.9 billion dollar government bailout. Noblesse oblige!

Others at the ceremony have benefited enormously from freedom freedom freedom too! Larry Summers we all know and love. But how about Gary Gensler, then treasury undersecretary, now head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – Brooksley Born, with her sheer ignorance of economics (defined as the science of putting as much money as possible into the pockets of the people who have as little morals as possible), was certainly not going to be invited back under King Summers! Another personage mentioned by Dickenson was a woman – cause, heck, some of the ladies do get with the program. Look at that there Wendy Gramm, the distinguished Senator's wife, who did so much for Enron. This one, another undersecretary of the Treasury, Linda Robertson, distinguished herself with an outstanding trajectory through the naughties, first as an Enron lobbyist (o frabjous day!), and now a senior advisor at the Fed!
…
So much for the fact that in country club, there’s no such thing as failure. Turning now to another product of the naughties, a liberal hawk who seemed to be consulted about Iraq every other day in the NYT, and who wrote numerous articles gravely sussing out the situation for the New York Review of Books, Peter Galbraith: Peter had a big day today. We learned that as he was ‘advising’ the Kurds and helping free the ever more free Iraqis, devising a constitition that enshrined humanity and federalism, particularily federalism, in our colony, he was also – an eager American and a go getter! – devising a little oil advisory company. And his work is paying off, as – through an absolute coincidence having to do with the provisions he helped put into the Iraqi constitution – he stands to gain 100 million dollars. Not bad! The country club breeds strong men – o, and sometimes the ladies too! – who have the guts to shed their own blood, figuratively, seat, figuratively, and tears, ever so figuratively, while all around are, well, being blown up, driven from their homes or tortured to death. The half a million Iraqi dead, and the two million refugees, may seem like a big thing today – but we are talking 100 million big ones, baby!
Interestingly, the NYT article said not word one of the way he was vetted for writing numerous op eds in the NYT editorial section. Was his byline, officer, Porcupine Group? Did they tell us this was a, to put a nasty word on it, war profiteer? No. Admittedly, his last name helped. Actually, I admit it kills me a little – I love his father and brother, and the one time I interviewed Peter, he seemed most obliging.
Hark, later in the day, an editorial note did appear:

“On Thursday, a news article in The Times reported on the ties between Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador, and a Norwegian oil company that operates in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. According to the Times article, Mr. Galbraith "received rights to an enormous stake in at least one of Kurdistan's oil fields in the spring of 2004.
Since that time, Mr. Galbraith has written several opinion articles for the Op-Ed page in support of Kurdish independence and security. These articles should have disclosed to readers that Mr. Galbraith could benefit financially from an independent Kurdistan that would not have to share oil revenues with Iraq.
Like other writers for the Op-Ed page, Mr. Galbraith signed a contract that obligated him to disclose his financial interests in the subjects of his articles. Had editors been aware of Mr. Galbraith's financial stake, the Op-Ed page would have insisted on disclosure or not published his articles.”

Which is placed below his Galbraith’s stirring call to have American soldiers fight and die to protect his investments:

“Seeing as we cannot maintain the peace in Iraq, we have but one overriding interest there today — to keep Al Qaeda from creating a base from which it can plot attacks on the United States. Thus we need to have troops nearby prepared to re-engage in case the Sunni Arabs prove unable to provide for their own security against the foreign jihadists.

This would be best accomplished by placing a small “over the horizon” force in Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdistan is among the most pro-American societies in the world and its government would welcome our military presence, not the least because it would help protect Kurds from Arab Iraqis who resent their close cooperation with the United States during the 2003 war. American soldiers on the ground might also ease the escalating tension between the Iraqi Kurds and Turkey, which is threatening to send its troops across the border in search of Turkish Kurd terrorists using Iraq as a haven.”

Oh. Peter Galbraith was one of Kerry's main advisors about Iraq in 2004. Bipartisanship, that is what this is all about - a handshake among oligarchs across the aisle not to take their eye off the ball - no matter how many lives it costs. The ball, of course, is their predatory wealth.

But such is life in an empire run by a corrupt and blind oligarchy. Bad for you, and bad for your children – even if you live on the other side of the world.

A writer's secret

2009-11-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

The lives of certain writers seem to be radiate out from anecdotes that only make sense on an anagogical reading, framed by a theology of the unknown God. Kafka and Gogol are supreme exemplars of this type.

In Donald Frame's The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, he writes that the opening of The Selected Passages from correspondence with Friends - a work that always been considered not only the worst thing Gogol ever wrote, but a sort of catastrophe, as though Gogol had gone senile -- Gogol said "he had prepared as a posthumous gift to his fellow countrymen ... 'the best of all things that my pen has produced... My composition entitled, 'A Farewell Tale'. It would reveal to them 'if only in part the strict secret of my life and the most sacred heavenly music of that secret.' He was reserving publication, he explained in a footnote, because what would have significance after a writer's death has no sense during his lifetime. "A Farewell Tale" was apparently never written - and Dostoevsky did not hesitate to brand Gogol's references to it as vran'yo (prevarication). Gogol, he suggested here and elsewhere, was an early version of his underground man. It was 'that same underground man which made Gogol, in a solemn testament, speak of a final tale which had sung itself out in his soul - and which in reality did not exist at all." Dostoevsky goes on to suggest that when Gogol began writing his testament he may not even have known he was about to mention a 'final tale.'

Dostoevsky's suggestion is in itself a masterpiece. And what writer, meditating on fiction, does not sometimes shudder at the childishness of make believe, the shamefulness of daydreaming, judged from the height of maturity? But that undermining of everything is countered by another - the moment you promise to tell the truth - only then do you see that the truly juvenile, shameful, and impossible task is complying with this promise. Even making the promise, which is made and has to be made everyday by every sentient, sane human being, is, when considered from the writer's perspective, a farce. The more solemn it is, the more whimsical it is. There's every chance that you will die tonight before you can even begin tomorrow to do what you promised yesterday. Not only that, but who made yesterday's promise? A person in such and such circumstances. That person no longer exists, in as much as those circumstances have shifted. Nail the promise by swearing on a book, swearing before a courtroom or a minister, and it turns from a wish into the most ludicrous lie that you have to surround, like a spoiled child, with infinite distractions. It is then that the unconscious, everybody's devil's advocate, will make other promises suddenly come into your mind. You grab your pen and you write one of them down - ah, this is just how to continue, to lend the right atmosphere to things! Now the words begin to flow!

That was a very, very cruel thing to mention. In what he said about Gogol, Dostoevsky spilled every writer's secret. Bastard.

Tolstoy's three deaths

2009-11-08T11:33:00.000-08:00

Tolstoy’s story, “Three Deaths” (1858), has been condescended to by his greatest critics. This is what Bakhtin wrote:

“This work, not large in size but nevertheless tri-leveled, is very characteristic of Tolstoy’s monologic manner.

Three deaths are portrayed in the story – the deaths of a rich noblewoman, a coachman, and a tree. But in this work Tolstoy presents death as a stage of life, as a stage illuminating that life, as the optimal point for understanding and evaluating that life in its entirety. Thus one could say that his story in fact portrays three lives totally finalized in their meaning and in their value. And in Tolstoy’s story all three lives, and the levels defined by them, are internally self enclosed and do not know each other. There is no more than a purely external pragmatic connection between them, necessary for the compositional and thematic unity of the story.”

Shkhlovsii contrasted the story with what he and the formalists regarded as the exemplary Tolstoy story, Kholstomer, about the death of a horse.

“The young Tolstoi was rather naïve in the way he constructed his parallel structures. Inn order to work out the theme of “dying”, that is, in order to illustrate it, Tolstoi felt it necessary in ‘The Three Deaths” to carry out three subthemes: the death of the mistress of the house, the death of the peasant, and the death of the tree. The three parts of the story are connected by a specific motivation: the peasant is the lady’s coachman, and the tree is chopped down to serve as a cross on the peasant’s grave.”

Bakhtin, of course, is setting up his game, with Tolstoy on the one side and Dostoevsky, that great unfinalizer, on the other. Dostoevsky’s characters, with their open, dialogic natures, may die, but cannot be summed up. Their emblematic moments tend to end badly. The body of saintly Father Zosima, in The Brothers Karamazov, gives off a vile smell of decay. In the Devils, Stepan Verkhovensky actually stops being a clown and a stooge at the end, and becomes a tragic Lear. Whereas, in Bakhtin’s view, Tolstoy’s finalized characters all end, like Ivan Illych, tied up in the sack. The three deaths, in Three deaths, conform to this pattern, in his view. What’s in death’s sack is what life is.

Shkhlovskii, perhaps Tolstoy’s greatest critic and much more sympathetic to what Tolstoy is doing, looks at Three Deaths as a sort of sketch for Tolstoy’s better work, in which the device of which he is a master, ostranie – estrangement, making strange – and the devices he has inherited from the folk tale and skaz deeply structure the overall vision. Estrangement is surely a thrust against finalization. Tolstoy, on this reading, is like Ezekial, down in the valley of the bones: “And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.” It is not for him to say yeah or nay to the Lord’s question.

Or, to take another stab at answering Bakhtin – yes, he is correct that Tolstoy does look at his characters from the ‘optimal’ pont of death; but this is not the same thing as finalizing them. Death is, of course, a leveler in Three Deaths. The very title, with its quantitative modifier, projects a certain radical equality into the story, the equality of the scythe that lops off the stalks of wheat regardless of their height. In the Christian sense, death is a tremendous leveler – for he who is first in the social world is still last, in that he will die. Death is not simply loss to others – it is an imminent, shaping loss to oneself, which is already in the midst of every gain. Ultimately, this is the reason death is on the side of making strange – if and when it becomes familiar, all the social ties are snapped.

Tolstoy’s contemporaries – particularly Grigor’ev - noted the accusatory force in the title. But Tolstoy, as a writer, threw them off, and still disconcerts us, because, for all his sense of death, he is a great describer of the animal life. His descriptions are not cold disavowals of sensual pleasure – Tolstoy obviously enjoys strong tastes, strong excitements, white bosoms, military glory, and physical strength. One has a sense that he is blindsiding the reader by being at once so intensely attuned to the sensual thrill and so aware of its annulment in death. This comes out most strongly when he writes about the life of women, who he can’t help but judge from his sensualist’s view, and who he then turns around and blames for arousing this feeling in him. It is the familiar demonic gesture of patriarchy, but made, here, with Tolstoy’s narrative genius. Still, the general point, whether it is the death of the petty aristocratic woman in Three Deaths or the death of Ivan Illych is that the sensual pleasures in which the happiness of life consists are, from the point of view of the absolute loss of death, nothing at all. Everything is built, every labour is made, in order to gain these sensual moments – and they are all naught.

But the latter is not an easy thought to keep in mind, as, after all, it may not be true. For death too can be looked at from the sensual moment – and from that moment, what is it? O Lord thou knowest – that is, it is an unknown for the individual, but one thing is known -- it is merely the end of me. There’s a great communist element in sensual enjoyment, and life is not a possession at the nerve ends, at the skin, in the mouth and stomach, coming out of the ass. It is something like a flood, a broad sweep, which tugs and carries the lonely and deluded me, who thinks he is doing all the work .

The estranging shock in Three Deaths is that the final death counts as much as the death of the noblewoman or the peasant:

“The ax rang more and more frequently; the white chips, full of sap, were scattered upon the dewy grass, and a slight cracking was heard beneath the blows. The tree trembled with all its body, leaned over, and quickly straightened itself, shuddering with fear on its base. For an instant all was still, then once more the tree bent over; a crash was heard in its trunk; and, tearing the thicket, and dragging down the branches, it plunged toward the damp earth. The noise of the ax and of footsteps ceased. The warbler uttered a cry, and flew higher. The branch which she grazed with her wings shook for an instant, and then came to rest like all the others their foliage. The trees, more joyously than ever, extended their motionless branches over the new space that had been made in their midst. The first sunbeams, breaking through the cloud, gleamed in the sky, and shone along the earth and heavens. The mist, in billows, began to float along the hollows; the dew, gleaming, played on the green foliage; translucent white clouds hurried along their azure path. The birds hopped about in the thicket, and, as if beside themselves, voiced their happiness; the juicy leaves joyfully and contentedly whispered on the tree-tops; and the branches of the living trees slowly and majestically waved over the dead and fallen tree.”

Although Bakhtin writes of this death as external to the other two, it isn’t quite true – the axe rings out because of a promise that the noblewoman’s coachman made to the dying peasant, in exchange for that peasant’s new boots. The promise was to put a cross on his grave, and the tree is to be measured and cut up into that cross. And the smallest reflection will tell you that one couldn’t just go out and cut down a tree in Russia – those trees were property, and they were being felled to feed industry The indebted nobility in Russian novels are always selling forested land. There’s a cash nexus connecting tree, peasant and noblewoman – as Stiva, Anna Karenina’s brother, well knew.

Of course, Bakhtin is right that the tree’s death – a silent fall, which briefly disturbs the birds, which go back to their singing, just as the trees spread their branches in the sun – gains its artistic power from being in contrast with, paralleled by exterior to, the peevish end of the noblewoman and the humble end of the peasant. Here again, things are arranged in such a way that we have two paths we can follow to Lady Shirkinskaya’s death. One would go through Tolstoy’s usual, incredible irritation with women. Their voices, their pleas, their bodies – everything irritates him. And that irritation trembles through the death scene like a barely suppressed anger:

“The sick woman dropped her head in token of assent. "O God! Pardon me, a sinner," she whispered.The cousin went out, and beckoned to the confessor. "She is an angel," she said to the husband, with tears in her eyes. The husband wept. The priest went into the sick room; the old lady still remained unconscious, and in the room beyond all was perfectly quiet. At the end of five minutes the confessor came out, and, taking off his stole, arranged his hair."Thanks be to the Lord, she is calmer now," said he. "She wishes to see you."The cousin and the husband went to the sick room. The invalid, gently weeping, was gazing at the images. "I congratulate you, my love," said the husband."Thank you. How well I feel now! What ineffable joy I experience!" said the sick woman, and a faint smile played over her thin lips. "How merciful God is! Is He not? He is merciful and omnipotent!"And again with an eager prayer she turned her tearful eyes toward the holy images.Then suddenly something seemed to occur to her mind. She beckoned to her husband."You are never willing to do what I desire," said she, in a weak and querulous voice.The husband, stretching his neck, listened to her submissively."What is it, my love?""How many times I have told you that these doctors don't know anything! There are simple women doctors; they make cures. That's what the good father said. ... A shopkeeper .... Send for him." ..."For whom, my love?" "Good heavens! You can never understand me." And the dying woman frowned, and closed her eyes.”

On the other hand, the artist in Tolstoy – which sees what the person doesn’t want to see, and writes it down – has already noted the weakness of the husband, his trust in doctors, his indecisiveness. If the woman is querulous, what is this but an almost physical flailing, like that of some drowning person who is being pulled down by the person who is supposed to be saving her? Trapped by her sex – for traveling to Italy, which she thinks will be good for her lungs, is out of the question if her husband doesn’t accompany her, whereas surely, the other way around, he would have gone without his wife without hesitation – she beats everything about her with her tongue. Unlike her husband, she is not, superstitiously, tied up in a belief in doctors – which has more to do with class than with science.

The peasant Feodor’s death, which connects Lady Shirkinskaya’s to the tree’s, occurs on a stove in a hut. And its real effect is not the death itself, but the fact that, dying, the peasant has no use for his new boots, and trades them to the coachman, Seryosha, for the promise of burial and a monument.

I love this part of the story:

"You take the boots, Seryoha," said he, conquering the cough, and getting his breath a little. "Only, do you hear, buy me a stone when I am dead," he added hoarsely."Thank you, uncle; then I will take them, and as for the stone, -- yei-yei! -- I will buy you one."There, children, you are witnesses," the sick man was able to articulate, and then once more he bent over and began to choke."All right, we have heard," said one of the drivers. "But run, Seryoha, or else the starosta will be after you again. You know Lady Shirkinskaya is sick."Seryoha quickly pulled off his ragged, unwieldy boots, and flung them under the bench. Uncle Feodor's new ones fitted his feet exactly, and the young driver could not keep his eyes off them as he went to the carriage. "Ek! What splendid boots! Here's some grease," called another driver with the grease-pot in his hand, as Seryoha mounted to his box and gathered up the reins. "Get them for nothing?" "So you're jealous, are you?" cried Seryoha, lifting up and tucking around his legs the tails of his overcoat. "Off with you, my darlings," he cried to the horses, cracking his knout; and the coach and barouche, with their occupants, trunks, and other belongings, were hidden in the thick autumnal mist, and rapidly whirled away over the wet road. “

There is a tale, a semiotic tale, to tell about boots, gloves, and other things that fit in Tolstoy. Of course, the peasants of Russia were dependent on the cottage industry of boot and shoemakers – no mass produced footwear for them. Boots that fit, well made boots, were naturally beautiful in the eyes of Seryosha. But this joy in a thing fitting is written all over Tolstoy’s work. There’s a reversible semiotic here – the fit of things – for instance, boots that fit the feet – and the grip of things. Good guns, whips, and handles of all kind please Tolstoy. And he likes to see the fit and grip of things in action. When Levin, in Anna Karenina, puts on the ice skates and effortlessly slides over the frozen pond, losing himself in the shapes he makes, this is the ecstasy of fitting. To slip into a groove and fill it and have power over it – this is a part of the sensual life that Tolstoy goes out to. A charge or raid, a dance in a ballroom – movements within a groove, a set pattern, crafted to the power of the mover, were intrinsically beautiful to him.

But of course the boots are Feodor’s boots, and him giving the boots up is a sign of his approaching death. Fitting takes a cruel turn here. What Tolstoy does not like in women is their lack of a tactile sense of grip and fit. Not that this is true of all women – but remember Tolstoy’s greatest heroine, Anna Karinina, dies on a railroad track – dies squashed lying on a thing that is engineered to the most precise fit.

catch 22 in the Zona

2009-11-01T07:50:00.000-08:00

Zeks in the Zona, sweating to pay the rent and the mortgage, have had some wonderful reading matter tossed to them this week as they sit before their Zek tvs and watch blue pills (it’s a blue pill!), cars and weak beer dance through the collective dream. For instance, they could have read the wonderful tale from Bloombergs about the supposed “negotiations” over the AIG payout last November. O zeks, do you remember how the Darwinian weeding out of the weak, so beloved of neo-classical economists, unfurled in its natural course back then? Well, of course you don’t, because Darwinian weeding out of the weak is only for the weak! The wealthy don’t have that extra 500 million sitting around to spend it all on dancing girls, no sir. Sometimes, you buy a legislature. Sometimes, you buy a Treasury department. And always, you have the Fed at your back as your friend, with whom you can discuss the finer points of Ayn Rand's philosophy.

But the Fed is subject to its own moods. Although our secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, might look like a weasel, evidently he was feeling more like Santa Claus, all jolly and fat and charitable last November. And so, remarkably, were his friends, the loveable crew of Santa’s helpers that sit on the board of the NY branch of the Fed – upstanding citizens like Stephen Freedman, former chairman of Goldman Sachs but, as we all know well, a patriot and a hero first and foremost, and our beloved Jamie Dimon, a busy man who not only helps direct Fed policy, but also manages JP Morgan – noblesse oblige, you know.

Now, these beauties were confronted with that little problem of AIG last November. A pesky thing. Oh, 150 billion were out there somewhere, being mulched. And the Fed was supposed to devise a rescue plan!

Because this was serious. It wasn’t like, say, this story, from a recent NYT piece about runaways:

“She ran away from her group home in Medford, Ore., and spent weeks sleeping in parks and under bridges. Finally, Nicole Clark, 14 years old, grew so desperate that she accepted a young man’s offer of a place to stay. The price would come later.
They had sex, and he soon became her boyfriend. Then one day he threatened to kick her out if she did not have sex with several of his friends in exchange for money.”

Another tale of the bad choices of the poor! Why, it might break your heart – or cause you to turn the newspaper page – but really, it would just be made infinitely worse if the state intervened to prop up lifestyles like this through yucky welfare. And no doubt this 14 year old doesn’t have the IQ, the smarts, that our heavenly bunch of NY Fed benchwarmers have. They are the cream of the crop, no doubt. So, let us say salut to Nicole and good luck surviving in Zona America, and come back to our exciting tale of the rescue of AIG’s counterparties!

“Beginning late in the week of Nov. 3, the New York Fed, led by PresidentTimothy Geithner, took over negotiations with the banks from AIG, together with the Treasury Department and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. Geithner’s team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps -- insurance-like contracts that backed soured collateralized-debt obligations.

…
Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public.
The New York Fed’s decision to pay the banks in full cost AIG -- and thus American taxpayers -- at least $13 billion. That’s 40 percent of the $32.5 billion AIG paid to retire the swaps. Under the agreement, the government and its taxpayers became owners of the dubious CDOs, whose face value was $62 billion and for which AIG paid the market price of $29.6 billion. The CDOs were shunted into a Fed-run entity called Maiden Lane III.”

It surely was gracious of the Fed to do that. Why, otherwise those counterparties – like, say, Goldman Sachs – might have been left a little temporarily improvident. Luckily, they would never have been forced to have sex with their “boyfriend’s” friends for money. They are too busy creating the wealth that the rest of us Zeks enjoy, God bless em!

So what happened, you might be thinking?

“The deal contributed to the more than $14 billion that over 18 months was handed to Goldman Sachs, whose former chairman, Stephen Friedman, was chairman of the board of directors of the New York Fed when the decision was made. Friedman, 71, resigned in May, days after it was disclosed by the Wall Street Journal that he had bought more than 50,000 shares of Goldman Sachs stock following the takeover of AIG. He declined to comment for this article.
In his resignation letter, Friedman said his continued role as chairman had been mischaracterized as improper. Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael DuVally declined to comment.
AIG paid Societe General $16.5 billion, Deutsche Bank $8.5 billion and Merrill Lynch $6.2 billion.”

Now, for those of you who like a little implication with your news, this story is all the more interesting for the clash between the Fed’s version of this transaction and GS’s version. According to the Fed, expecting AIG’s counterparties to take a haircut of 40 percent was impossible, since this would have driven them to the wall:

“Far more money was wasted in paying the banks for their swaps, says Donn Vickrey of financial research firm Gradient Analytics Inc. “In cases like this, the outcome is always along the lines of 50, 60 or 70 cents on the dollar,” Vickrey says.
A spokeswoman for Geithner, now secretary of the Treasury Department, declined to comment. Jack Gutt, a spokesman for the New York Fed, also had no comment.
One reason par was paid was because some counterparties insisted on being paid in full and the New York Fed did not want to negotiate separate deals, says a person close to the transaction. “Some of those banks needed 100 cents on the dollar or they risked failure,” Vickrey says.”

Yet, after pocketing its 12.9 billion, GS has consistently maintained that it didn’t need it. Gee, you think they might then have given it to, say, fourteen year old Nicole – but no, what GS means is that they had counterparties to their counterparties at AIG who, in November of 2008, would have gladly forked out the 12.9 billion to them.

This is truly a story of miracles, a holiday story for the whole family! Much like that Jimmy Stewart one, if we purged the Stewart character and made the hero, oh, some GS ex exec on a Fed branch board. A much better hero all the way around!

The Fed has noticed that their story, per Bloomberg, makes a mockery of GS’s story – and not just a mockery. It is actually against the law for a company to lie about such things at news conferences, as this, for one thing, distorts stock prices. Some sleepy NY attorney general could actually investigate, although the likelihood of anybody investigating is pretty close to zero. Still, newspapers could rattle these cages. So stories have to be aligned. This is from the Washington Post, Friday:

“New York Fed officials explained that the main reason creditors were willing for a time to accept less than full reimbursement was their fear of an AIG bankruptcy. The government's rescue of the company removed that threat and left the company with virtually no way to wrestle concessions from the banks.
"In its negotiations with its counterparties, AIG just didn't have the same bargaining power that it did with the Federal Reserve standing in the background," said Thomas C. Baxter, New York Fed's general counsel. "The only sensible outcome was to give them what they were legally entitled to."

And then there is this:

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. “Is Orr crazy?”
“He sure is,” Doc Daneeka said.
“Can you ground him?”
“I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.”
“Then why doesn’t he ask you to?”
“Because he’s crazy,” Doc Daneeka said. “He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.”
“That’s all he has to do to be grounded?”
“That’s all. Let him ask me.”
“And then you can ground him?” Yossarian asked.
“No. Then I can’t ground him.”
“You mean there’s a catch?”
“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.”

Well, our zek might be puzzled by these events, and even begin to think that something isn’t right. And he would no doubt be confounded further by the history of Citibank, as processed by today’s NYT article about the four times it has had to be rescued by the Government.

This paragraph sets up a nice contrast between apparatchik and zek in this crazy world of small government lovin’ Wall Street, where capitalism is king!

“As a result, the government has handed Citigroup $45 billion under the Troubled Asset Relief Program over the last year. Through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a major bank regulator, the government has also agreed to back roughly $300 billion in soured assets that sit on Citigroup’s books. Even as other troubled institutions recently curtailed their use of another F.D.I.C. program that backs new debt issued by banks, Citigroup has continued to tap the arrangement.

Citigroup is also one of only two TARP recipients so desperate for capital that they’ve swapped government-issued shares into common stock, diluting existing shareholders. (GMAC, the troubled auto lender that may receive another government infusion, is the other.)

While Citigroup has written down tens of billions of dollars’ worth of mortgages on its books, there are looming problems in its huge credit card portfolio. Of the company’s $1.2 trillion in credit commitments outstanding in the second quarter, $873 billion were credit card lines. A measure of the bank’s efforts to wrestle that problem to the ground is the interest it charges customers: in October, Citigroup raised interest rates on some credit card holders to 29.99 percent.”

30 percent interest. That’s some interest! And in fact, before the law was reformed in the golden days of Reagan, it was charged mainly by men whose assistants carried lead pipes and exacted in-kind late fees. But just as drug dealers, those unheralded entrepreneurs, created business m.o.s that have become standard for big pharma – see your doctor about the blue pill! – so, too, the mafia’s defunct – like e.e. cumming’s buffalo bill. The frontier has been passed and trampled into the ground, and debt slavery, once considered the scourge of peasants, is now just good business. Interest helps us get an x ray of power in America – banks get loans at 2 percent, I believe it is at present, with which they can buy T-notes paying 3 to 4 percent, or loan out money to zeks at 30 - you know how it goes. It’s a meritocracy, baby.

With a few catches.

Marx and Mises sitting in a tree

2009-10-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

Of the two von Mises boys, I infinitely prefer Richard to Ludwig. My experience reading Ludwig von Mises is to recoil at each and every page and concept. Yet he did have one view with which I sympathize.

First, a little background. When he was young, Ludwig von Mises wrote a thesis about money that has had an odd career in, of all places, America. Mises was concerned with the fact that, in a perfect free market system, we should have a mechanism that allocates capital very much outside any government diktat, and we should allow the full Darwinian mechanism of selection to operate – failures should not be propped up. Yet, with fractional reserve banking, a snake was set loose in this Eden of Entrepreneurs. Banks could get so big, and they could leverage their assets to such an extent, that instead of nice discrete Darwinian extinctions, we would have mass extinctions. In order to secure themelves, the banks persuaded governments to become insurers of last resort - and at that point, secure from Darwinian morality, banks responded not to the narrow call of survival, but to the rentseekers tremendous trumpet of speculation. In this way, the allocation of capital, instead of being in perfect harmony with the visions of entrepreneurs, was inefficiently skewed to boobytrapped schemes, rigged to pay off to the bank’s management, and to be paid for, when they failed, by the state.

Although the story is longer than this, it about sums up Mises theory.

Now, the first thing we notice about the theory is that all empirical evidence is against it.

Developed economies, with Central banks and bank insurance, were able to loosen up credit not only on the level of business, but also on the level of the individual household. Non-developed countries, on the other hand, lacked that credit capacity. If there is a single determinant of the prospects for development in the twentieth century, it is a developed financial sector. The Soviet Union, de-developing itself, refused to develop a credit system and thus was forced to borrow from abroad and curb even those fields – like computers – in which it had a human capital advantage. It was the lack of credit killed communism as surely as lack of credit (even more than lack of faith in God) drove Raskolnikov to axe the moneylender.

If you read nineteenth century from the economists point of view, you will soon notice that the limits of the worlds of the characters are the limits of their credit lines. That was the world in which Baudelaire and Bloy could find the whole notion of debt diabolical. Not that they were wrong in terms of the general economy – but we live in this world by dickering with the devil.

But there is, still, a core of truth in Mises’s idea. While any developed economy needs a robust credit system, it also needs to put stringent curbs on speculation. Otherwise, the production of real goods and services will soon serve the servants – the speculators – whose only social function is to provide capital for risky enterprises.

Here, then, is where Mises and Marx can join hands: making sure that speculation does not take over industry.

In the U.S., the way speculation has taken over industry is the equities markets. In particular, the discussion of whether the stock of a corporation should, in the aggregate, represent more than its assets was won by the yes side. The progressive Republicans of 1910 were opposed to the idea of what they called watered stock.

I’ve often alluded to the bill, sponsored by Teddy Roosevelt’s partisans in the House and senate, that would have crushed this speculative impetus. To my mind, this is a much more sensible idea than the dissolution of the Federal Bank. It would actually have the same effect – to remove speculative inefficiencies from the economy. I’ve been thinking about this since reading Ian Welsh’s blog.

I made a comment there I will reproduce here:

I’m partial to Theodore Roosevelt’s remedy for curbing the power of the speculators in an economy. The supreme result of Roosevelt’s populism - which went beyond anything else proposed in the U.S. in the 20th century - was a bill , S232, that passed the House in 1911. Here is how it is described by Lawrence Mitchell in the Speculation Economy:

“It would have replaced traditional state corporate finance law by preventing companies from issuing “new stock” for more than the cash value of their assets, addressing both traditional antitrust concerns and newer worries about the stability of the stock market by preventing overcapitalization. But it would have done much more.

S. 232 was designed to restore industry to its primary role in American business, subjugating finance to its service. It would have directed the proceeds of securities issues to industrial progress by preventing corporations from issuing stock except “for the purpose of enlarging or extending the business of such corporation or for improvements or betterments”, and only with the permission of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Corporations would only be permitted to issue stock to finance revenue-generating industrial activities rather than finance the ambitions of sellers and promoters. … S. 232 would have restored the industrial business model to American corporate capitalism and prevented the spread of the finance combination from continuing it dominance of American industry.” (137) In Sklar’s account of the Roosevelt era draft, ‘whenever the amount of outstanding stock should exceed the value of assets, the secretary would require the corporation to call in all staock and issue new stock in lieu thereof in an amount not exceeding the value of assets, and each stockholder would be required to surrender the old stock and receive the new issue in an amount proportionate to the old holdings.”

We didn’t put these curbs in place in 1911. Since then, Speculation has become dominant in the U.S. economy. The whole trick of neo-liberalism is to extrude the old social insurance net, which was the great product of the progressive and new deal eras, into the private sphere. In essence, crush the bargaining power of labor, loosen restraints on credit, and tie the median income class directly to the speculative markets.

This has had the effect of creating a politics that is basically about pampering the speculative sector. It is, of course, a disaster for the vast majority of people. And that there was a lively discussion about speculation at all once upon a time - from 1890 to 1914 - has been utterly forgotten. You rarely ever hear a radical nowadays say, why don’t we simply overtunr the system of watered stock? Which, in effect, would mean that if you owned stock in a company, you really owned the company, rather than a financial instrument whose value was solely determined in a secondary market. The simple genius of requiring that the stock would have to equal the outstanding assets, and no more, would shatter the whole system at a blow. It is a system that needs shattering desperately.

republican virtue and equality

2009-10-26T18:18:00.000-07:00

The view of equality that was reflected in the first phase of Cold War liberalism could be summed up in a sort of koan: equality is one of the necessary goals towards which any good society strives. At the same time, the failure to attain equality is a necessary structuring principle that makes the good society possible.

Among the canons of Cold War Liberalism, no text was clearer about this double bind than Rawls’ Theory of Justice. In no other area of political philosophy was the difference between Cold War liberalism and its classical predecessors so significant. The experience of the devastating wars of the twentieth century, and the Great Depression, had destroyed the old gentleman’s liberalism for which Hayek pined. In its place was a liberalism that ceded, and promoted, an interventionist state. But, in continuity with the old anti-egalitarian thematic, the CW Liberals saw the danger of perfect equality from two perspectives. From the economic perspective, while conceding the performance of the mixed economies of the developed world, that performance would be endangered if positional incentives were wholly removed from the picture. Thus, the people on the bottom would be peculiarly hurt by a totally equal society, for those were the people who benefited most from the technological innovations of the private sphere. The second danger was political. To maintain equality required some body, some institution, some party. But the enforcers of equality would not only destroy liberty, but would themselves simply recreate inequality in terms of other goods. The administrator whose pay, in a capitalist society, put him well above the wealth of a worker on the assembly line, was matched by the party administrator whose perks and power, in a communist society, permitted him access to a lifestyle far above that of the workers for whom he supposedly spoke.

It is important, nonetheless, that these perspectives on the vicious effects of equality did not annul the idea that a society should strive for equality – rather, they dictated a strategy of indirection. The being in Rawls’ Original Position, here, is doing something similar to the Duke in Measure for Measure, who hides himself in order to deputize another, in the ‘ambush of his name’, to create decorum in the state. And just as the Duke’s more puritanical laws prove unworkable without mercy – that is, without interpretive elbow room, and a consideration of circumstances – so, too, laws that too bind the powerful in the state so as to lower them altogether to the common level will deaden the creative function in the social order.

I make this comparison because in the end, the striving for equality is a form of republican virtue, and the argument for it is based on that virtue.

As we all know, the Cold War liberal consensus fell apart. Its fall was the fall, too, of the ideal of equality. From being an ideal that was expressed in opportunity (always a mooncalf of an idea), it became the target of a prolonged attack in itself. Rather inequality became, if not the open ideal of the neo-liberal thinkers, at least a correlate to the triumph of the most meritorious. The most meritorious, it turned out, were the administrators of corporations, and the investors. What their merit consisted in is that they were rich. In other words, inequality was its own justification. The neo-liberal ideology rescued the old Cold War liberal critique of equality while jettisoning the saving corollary of striving for equality.

Which brings me to a comparison of two very different articles. One is this excellent piece in the London review of Books by David Runciman. It is a review of a blast from the cold war liberal past – The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Wilkinson and Pickett produce a critique not of the striving for equality that was part of the Cold War order, but of the assumption that the closer a society got to perfect equality, the worse off it would become economically and socially. On the contrary, Wilkinson and Pickett use plenty of cross country analysis to show that, in any number of lifestyle measures, from prevelance of obesity to the size of the incarcerated population, the more equal the society, the better for everyone.

For everyone… that’s the rub for Runciman. He takes up a theme that is familiar to us Foucaultian-Marxy types, a theme that is ignored by the Cold War Liberal position. It is that the positional economy is all about power and its entrenchment. From this perspective, the fiction of the original position is not benign, but blinding. It blinds one to the struggle for power that makes it the case that the wealthy want to be wealthier, and more powerful than, others.

The dark tradition of Republican virtue goes back to Thucydides, and up through Machiavelli, Hobbes and Montequieu. The lesson of all Republics is that they last only as long as their institutions are not hollowed out by private power. Thus, the first duty of the state is to exercise violence against the most powerful private parties. To put it in plain English, we do not tax the rich at a higher rate because we want to use that money for social welfare, or for the poor – we do it firstly in order to make the rich less rich. This, I think is always true. Rawls’ Theory assumes that we have passed a historical point where Republics could be threatened by private parties in this way. The whole of the last thirty years, I think, proves he was wrong.

But the liberal hope lives on that the rich and powerful are, somehow, simply rational actors who, accumulating their goods successfully, want more than anything else to contribute to the social good. Thus, Wilkinson and Pickett argue that even the rich would be better off in more equal societies. Runciman doesn’t buy it:

“This sounds like a knock-down political argument: more equality would give rich people in unequal societies the kind of life chances that even poor people enjoy elsewhere. Who could object to that? It needs to hold for more than just infant mortality, however, and this is where the evidence is shakier. Another area where Wilkinson and Pickett present the data according to social class instead of simply the overall average is literacy scores. But here we find a slightly different story. Finland probably has the best educational system in the world, and disadvantaged Finnish children significantly outperform disadvantaged children in the UK, just as these do better than their counterparts in the US. But it is not the case that rich kids in the UK have worse literacy scores than poor kids in Finland; they simply have worse scores than rich kids in Finland. Moreover, rich kids in the UK have much better literacy scores than poor kids in the UK, because the social gradient is so steep, so the gap between the top and bottom is wider than it is in Finland. Education, unlike infant mortality, is a comparative as well as an absolute good. Parents want their kids to do better than other kids (whereas, one hopes, they don’t need to see other people’s children die in order to enjoy bringing their own safely home from hospital). Inequality in the UK means that rich parents can see their kids doing much better than other kids, even if they are not doing as well as they might if they lived in Finland. So the politics is considerably harder here: you can’t simply say that inequality means we are all suffering together. Instead, it may mean that the poor are doing so badly that the rich aren’t interested in looking at the wider picture. They are focused on making sure they don’t wind up poor.”

Runciman baulks, here, at reading the Will to Power into the entrenching force of great wealth. I myself have no doubt. The reason a person with one hundred million dollars pays a lobbyist to pay off a legislature to make sure that his taxes don’t go up by a million dollars is not from some fear that he will be a poor, bereft fellow with merely 50 million smackers: it is because the money, at that point, is about power. And, in the ceaseless struggle for power in the Republic, when the wealthy aren’t continually attacked in their bases, the poor will be attacked.

Which is the tale told by the second article, this one in the NYT:

“MEDFORD, Ore. — Dressed in soaked green pajamas, Betty Snyder, 14, huddled under a cold drizzle at the city park as several older boys decided what to do with her.
Betty said she had run away from home a week earlier after a violent argument with her mother. Shivering and sullen-faced, she vowed that she was not going to sleep by herself again behind the hedges downtown, where older homeless men and methamphetamine addicts might find her.
The boys were also runaways. But unlike them, Betty said, she had been reported missing to the police. That meant that if the boys let her stay overnight in their hidden tent encampment by the freeway, they risked being arrested for harboring a fugitive.
“We keep running into this,” said one of the boys, Clinton Anchors, 18. Over the past year, he said, he and five other teenagers living together on the streets had taken under their wings no fewer than 20 children — some as young as 12 — and taught them how to avoid predators and the police, survive the cold and find food.”

These are, of course, the Children of the Great Moderation:

“Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens.
Federal studies and experts in the field have estimated that at least 1.6 million juveniles run away or are thrown out of their homes annually. But most of those return home within a week, and the government does not conduct a comprehensive or current count.
The best measure of the problem may be the number of contacts with runaways that federally-financed outreach programs make, which rose to 761,000 in 2008 from 550,000 in 2002, when current methods of counting began. (The number fell in 2007, but rose sharply again last year, and the number of federal outreach programs has been fairly steady throughout the period.)”

It is questionable how far the rot has gone in the American republic. The last thirty years has produced an amazing spectacle of the comparatively poor defending the rights of the ominously rich. A friend of mine, an avid hate radio listerner, has many a terrible thing to say about Obama’s socialism and how it will destroy our system of healthcare. Meanwhile, his brother, who had nothing, just died in the hospital, after accumulating a debt there of at least a million dollars, which nobody in my friend’s family could, or has any intention of paying. The altruistic defense of greed is surely one of the poison plants that signal the collapse of republican virtue.

As for Betty Snyder, her kind have long been targeted by the theologians of power, the economists. I’m reminded of a remark in freakonomics by David Cochrane, the University of Chicago economist, in November of 2008:

“I absolutely love the following excerpt, which better captures what it is like to hang around with Chicago economists than just about any quote I have ever seen:
“We should have a recession,” [John] Cochrane said in November, speaking to students and investors in a conference room that looks out on Lake Michigan. “People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.”

Among the things they do is lose their homes and their children, who fall prey to meth and rapists, as par of this wonderful thing – this contrarian ecstasy – that are the wages of the violence of the powerful against the miserable in America.

Address to the Academy about Political Hatred

2009-10-23T17:54:00.000-07:00

And this I say unto you – that the Apocalypse is secretly written in the division of labor…

Or, perhaps I should put this another way. Hum.

Cioran, following in the footsteps of Bloy and Rozanov, is surely right that sociability is a thin mask covering universal hatred. The hatred we feel for each other as soon as we become political (as political we must become in modernity, it is our fate, just as it is the fate of the cow in the chute to become meat) is an astonishing and little studied fact. Or, rather, it has been thrust into a platitudinous past by British utilitarians (taking up Hobbes’ war of all against all), who, perhaps rightly, ceased to think in terms of social psychology as soon as they invented the individual – a mock Jesus, an immaculate nouveau né who popped out of an accountant’s ledger.

Still, it seems to me that we have to explain two things in this world, I mean really explain – in fact, only these explanations are really crucial, although also, unfortunately, we always fail at the task. The two things are as follows: 1., Why does man universally hate man? And 2, why does man, nevertheless, universally love man?

Now, looking at those two questions under a high powered microscope, the first thing you will notice is that, ahem, they are, ahem… totally contradictory.

This is inexplicable. And in this address (you may now put away the high powered microscopes) I mean only to answer the first question.

I would guess that the hatred is, in fact, the sublimation of the great, debilitating, I might even say existential fatigue that lays ahold of us whenever we try to explain… anything. The least little thing. By which I mean the least little thing upon which there can be some disagreement. I am not, here, speaking of the grand architecture of the entire health care system. No, I am speaking, first, of such matters as, well, the best route to take from your house to the airport. I am speaking of disagreement over the hero’s motives in a tv sitcom. Or I am talking about whether the steak you ordered in a restaurant was cooked to the degree of rareness you requested or whether they simply ignored you and set down on your plate a piece of meat that was either bleeding or dry as a crouton.

Disagreement rains down in the universe like Lucretius’ atoms. In sum, they constitute everything that happens or will happen or that can be conceived of happening. And, mark this – every atomic disagreement can give rise to an infinity of disagreement. That is to say, an infinite argument can arise over anything at all. When we look at our fellow human beings, we realize that to move them in any way we will have to expend infinite energy, and that we will have to repeat the process an infinite number of times. Now, if we were only as reasonable as Oblomov, we would immediately go to bed and never get up, for the world is too overwhelming to deal with. In some corner of our heart, Oblomov’s response is our own.

But ---
But we don’t go to bed. We dash around, we read things, we talk.
Now, here I want to call upon a fact that everybody must have noticed at some time or another, viz, the fact that children like to stay up past their bed or nap times, and the fact that when they succeed, they immediately get cranky. Though we learn to drink coffee and fear deadlines, underneath, we feel that crankiness, in as much as we are not lying under a blanket, but we are actually trying to perform the infinite task of persuading people of our point of view. This is why men will divide up a city and butcher each other, quarter by quarter. Gain is secondary, the main thing is that other people don’t agree with us. And every disagreement projects a project of infinite and futile energy, as we try to convince them that they are wrong about this very important matter – as, for instance, that the steak was raw, not rare.

And this is how, by alchemy, a fact is transformed into a disagreement which is transformed into a massacre.